Perspective

[Brainles]

Let's turn this around a bit shall we for a second, and see how the company may view things.

Look back at all major MMO launches in the past 5 years. Players all want to try the new shiny. 2-3 months in players leave for any number of reasons, dislike gameplay, no endgame content, lack of story, etc.

These servers cost a lot. A company must be profitable, to satisfy a short term solution to appease a public that may not be around for a future is bad business.

Add AFK timeouts? Stop gap but a good start. Free time? Probably, but also lost revenue.

Players canceling subscriptions/preorders is also lost revenue. However companies have plans in place, they do not expect to get everyone, they have internal numbers that they expect to get, they will always attempt to get more, but they balance it out vs costs.

Am I frustrated? Yes I am, very. Complain, be heard, but be polite and respectful, but they weigh these issues differently.

[ChanceFurystrike]

Excuses, and not good ones either. The JPN datacenter is handling things fine, even as NA/EU players migrate over to them. However, those of us who are legacy who have spent hundreds of hours already on our characters don't want to have to start over simply because the bleep can't get fixed and world transfers are not enabled. The JPN datacenter is state of the art. Obviously the same can't be said for the Canadian...err I mean NA/EU one. Perhaps Dallas or Atlanta, places known for great data centers, would've been a better choice.

[Brainles]

The decision on a data center is also a cost vs risk issue. Sure the JP servers have stayed up better, but I've made characters there too, and they are nowhere near as full.

I'm not making excuses, it is how a company runs. Will they regret some of their choices to save on costs? Probably. These issues would have hit JP servers as well, as they have brought down JP servers to integrate the fixes from NA/EU ones.

It also does help being a Japan based company, they have better deals and offers. Also FFXI was not the most popular MMO in North America, they may have underestimated their audience, or the players need for something new.

[Vensaval]

I appreciate seeing this calm and reasonable post amongst the storm of rage that currently exists.

In my case, I'm envious of the people that have even gotten the slightest amount of chance to play. Not only am I not in Early Access, but I'm only going to begin working soon, so I haven't even had the funds to purchase the game, yet. Which means I won't be able to play for a while.

Beta was it for me at the moment. The rest of you should appreciate what you have. Even if it's minuscule.

[Vanidin]

Server costs these days are actually a fraction of the total costs of an MMO. Development, marketing, legal, office space etc are where the money goes. The costs to purchase several rack servers to add new worlds would be negligible compared to the loss of even 1k subscriptions for a month due to an awful initial experience. Not too mention a server is easy to re-purpose or sell if no longer needed.

[Demlix]

Anyone else notice they HAVE A FUCKING FORUM THREAD DAILY LIMIT?!? so not only is limiting game servers enough, they need to limit our trolling too.

They had server stress issues during Open Beta, and they had the opportunity to delay launch another week, maybe even two. But some genius at SE said, "fuck it, doesn't need to be perfect, let's roll with it"

It most definitely needs to be perfect it's a re-release!

[Brainles]

Server costs are not a fraction, having to look at them for my current company, they are a hefty cost, especially when attempting to procure them overseas. They are also not easy to repurpose, unless you have other projects or companies willing to purchase at a much reduced rate. Specifically dedicated servers (which is what they run).

And yes those other costs all factor in, it is why companies layoff employees, shut down departments, etc. Unless a company wants to go under they are continuously weighing cost vs service.

Yoshi said as much when he discussed F2P vs subscriptions.

All I was offering is a different perspective for anyone that is willing to view things from the other side.

[LunarRei]

Server costs are not a fraction, having to look at them for my current company, they are a hefty cost, especially when attempting to procure them overseas. They are also not easy to repurpose, unless you have other projects or companies willing to purchase at a much reduced rate. Specifically dedicated servers (which is what they run).

And yes those other costs all factor in, it is why companies layoff employees, shut down departments, etc. Unless a company wants to go under they are continuously weighing cost vs service.

Yoshi said as much when he discussed F2P vs subscriptions.

All I was offering is a different perspective for anyone that is willing to view things from the other side.

Hardware isn't that costly compared to development. Besides, their server infrastructure is likely virtualized which saves boatloads of money and is far more reliable. I'm not downplaying the cost of getting this game off the ground, but I don't think infrastructure is the bulk of the ballast.

All in all, given the history of this game and, frankly, the franchise lately, a lot is at stake with this launch. I have no idea what the problem is but it probably isn't as simple as server load. It's just easier for most people to digest.

[Vanidin]

All I was offering is a different perspective for anyone that is willing to view things from the other side.

but that's the thing, we're the CUSTOMER. Our side is the only one that matters, irregardless of their issues the burden of providing satisfaction falls to SE. Trying to "understand" their problems with the servers is one thing but don't make excuses for them when they won't even be honest with us about what is going on or even make an effort to make it seem like they want to keep us informed.

They are running server clusters to support this game, multiple servers for duty finder, login, etc etc etc. They are not running a dedicated server system, that's not feasible with this scope of a game. More than likely the game servers are virtualized as LunarRei said and I bet it's probably in a typical rack mount setup.

[Yashnaheen]

And on the flip side- People expected this game to fail. SE Knows a lot of other MMOs had poor launches which lost a lot of player interest. Due to reputation alone they could not afford to let that happen. More hardware costs is far better than confirming the many naysayers out there who won't give the game a chance to iron out old bugs.

As stated above computing power is dirt cheap, flexible, easy to reuse and resell these days. Storage costs more than processing, but they don't seem to be having a storage issue.