Tokyo - Rolling Blackouts through Summer

[Jinko]

Move the servers to America, it would solve a lot of problems.

[GabbaGabba]

Move the servers to America, it would solve a lot of problems.

it would also create a lot more problems, such as whos gonna pay for the server farm and rent out the space to put it. electricity bill, plus they would basically have to live in america or pay some people to maintain their servers for maintenence. i would rather spend all that money and buy backup generators that can supply the servers with power for the hours that they go offline.

[Jinko]

Who's guna pay for it, silly question isn't it ?

And yes they would need staff to run it but its only temporary and they could no doubt use staff from the NA division of SE.

[Nabiri]

Not that I think they ever will be, but IF the servers were separated by region I would quit. Wouldn't be able to play with my boyfriend, and losing the JP community... that would take too much away from the game for me. Wouldn't be very fun.

[Kaedan]

I think some of you might be confused. Please allow me to explain.

SE's servers aren't actually in any of the blackout zones. If they were, we'd be experiencing frequent server shutdowns while their turn for blackout came around (and even if they were in the blackout zones... we haven't had frequent shutdowns due to blackouts yet, so why would it change?).

But what they've done is reduced their power consumption to help alleviate the drain on the Tokyo grid in general.

So no, we won't have regular server downtimes, but the people who work in the building will eventually have to deal with no A/C come June/July. Though I'm sure their power consumption can probably handle a few rotating fans to help out.

[Abriael]

There is a simple solution to this.... Region dedicated servers. Have some servers in NA and Europe and leave the current servers for Asia. Yes i'm talking about splitting the players into their own region.

No. Thank you.
One of the major point of appeal of this game is that it does NOT segregate the players by region, creating a truly international community.
Regional segregation is completely antiquated and surpassed in today's globalized internet, and developers segregating their players by region are actually doing a disservice to them.

By the way, using the consequences of a natural disaster to further your personal agenda is pretty much contemptible.

In any case. Rolling blackouts are not going to affect FFXIV in any way. Just as for the previous rolling blackouts it's extremely unlikely that the rolling blackouts will affect the Shibuya City area (where the server farm is located). It's the commercial heart of Japan, and the administrators of Tepco know very well that by shutting it down, even temporarily, they would do more damage than good, especially when they can blackout much less important areas, exactly like they did so far.

S-E shut down the servers as a volunteer act to help improve the situation in the emergency immediately after the earthquake. They have since found other ways to save the same amount of energy, so it's extremely unlikely that further rolling blackouts will affect FFXIV in any sizable way.

[Micrll]

Ok, as a Computer Science Student about to graduate in a month let me add a few comments.

First off, as for the blackouts affecting the servers. Most fill blown data centers should be able to handle a few hours of scheduled blackout no problem, they are generally fed by battery power (or flywheel in some "green" data centers) and run off of the power that comes out of that rather than the power from the grid (tends to be cleaner energy anyways as you don't have to worry about short spikes / shortages). Most data centers will also have generators to keep the power going as the battery can only power the place for a short while.
Picture of the setup
http://eetdnews.lbl.gov/nl12/images/data-center.gif

In addition many of these data centers can remove themselves from the grid "on demand", a company I interned with had a deal with the power company that they could switch to generator power in times of peak demand by other users. I suspect that this would be the case with the our servers / data centers. As the power outages are scheduled they should be able to handle the switch-off fairly well.


Also I will point out that it IS possible to have created the game with "regional" servers that all communicate between each other. The idea being that US players connect to a US server 'node' which is the one communicating with the JPN and other regional servers on a dedicated line. Of course while this would speed up lag for stuff like UI and responsiveness it would slow down communications and interaction between servers on different nodes. This sort of setup similar to what IRC chat uses.
Of course while it IS possible to do this its something that would have had to have been designed at the very beginning to support it and I HIGHLY doubt we will see it happen ever with XIV.

[Kaedan]

Ok, as a Computer Science Student about to graduate in a month let me add a few comments.

First off, as for the blackouts affecting the servers. Most fill blown data centers should be able to handle a few hours of scheduled blackout no problem, they are generally fed by battery power (or flywheel in some "green" data centers) and run off of the power that comes out of that rather than the power from the grid (tends to be cleaner energy anyways as you don't have to worry about short spikes / shortages). Most data centers will also have generators to keep the power going as the battery can only power the place for a short while.
Picture of the setup
http://eetdnews.lbl.gov/nl12/images/data-center.gif

In addition many of these data centers can remove themselves from the grid "on demand", a company I interned with had a deal with the power company that they could switch to generator power in times of peak demand by other users. I suspect that this would be the case with the our servers / data centers. As the power outages are scheduled they should be able to handle the switch-off fairly well.

While I appreciate your attempt to educate people, it's unnecessary. The simple fact is that the servers are not in a blackout zone. So the whole point is moot.