1.0 servers are going to re-open?Follow

From http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/58056-Post-Dalamud-Messages-from-Yoshi-P%21



Where did this come from? Last I checked, anyone could play without a subscription (at least during the last event). Also, character data still won't be saved?

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And by popular request she means specifically barely 35% of people wanted them reopened and yoship decided that was good enough..so yes they're reopening, no there's no purpose to it and yes, you'll be wasting your time unless you truly want to experience the content if enough people still even care to log into it.

They do, for alpha testing..doesn't stop em from shutting this version down though since by all rights it should have been ended by november 2010.

I expect this "non-saved" server up to last about a month. This will have the low populations of the post-11/1 save without the expectation of a major event occurring shortly.

I don't claim to be a master programming, but I've always wondered why SE chose to do this large shutdown before they were ready to bring up the 2.0.

I understand that they need time to do the data save and transfer, and that is something that can't be done while the game is live, but I don't frankly understand why they can't do an Alpha (maybe even beta) and debug on separate servers concurrent with live 1.0 FFXIV. I would sincerely hope that something debugged on one server would be able to be implemented on another server with relatively little extra effort. Hell, they're doing something similar with XI on the test server already.

As far as I can tell, their decision making is based on one of two (or both) assumptions;
1) they have no idea what they're doing, and are hoping and praying people are willing to stick it out
2) they know exactly what they are doing, but don't give a fig if the current players come back or not

Frankly in my opinion, when 2.0 does come back I don't think it'll be all roses. Too much time will pass, and people are going to just walk away with nothing but promises for the next three months. I think it'll be more along the lines of if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Whether they know it or not, SE needs the 1.0 players to keep word of mouth going; we all know how effective SE is on advertising on their own these days...

Your point is well put Catwho, except that I don't expect they're using the recently saved data for the alpha or beta testing. People will have preset characters or create new ones for that.

I understand there's time involved in data transfer/data conversion, but that conversion is independent of debugging the game system. To put it another way, they're working in series instead of working in parallel. Inefficient at best.

Right now the work is progressing as such;

- Final save
- Shut down game 1.0
- Start alpha
- Adjust code based on alpha testing
- If necessary, adjust data conversion based on alpha testing
- Start beta
- Adjust code based on beta testing
- If necessary, adjust data conversion based on beta testing
- Check to make sure that the data conversion works properly
- Convert data
- Start up 2.0

Since they're not (or if they are, shouldn't be) using the final save data for the testing, then the final save and 1.0 shut down could have been moved until they were ready to begin converting data.

There's also the manpower use and maintenance to consider.

A server that no longer receives any updates or database maintenance is easy to run with minimal manpower, allowing the mass bulk to redouble efforts on the new version, which, as they said in the live letter, they are already about two and a half months behind schedule on due to efforts in the system in zones that contain more than 800 people (A capacity they defiantly want to increase on given that they will be doing more Live event activities that could attract innumerable amount of people to the same zone on a given server.)

In their view, AAR takes precedence over all else, so giving the set date out for the Version 1 servers to end progression, and focusing their manpower back into AAR for the remainder is actually a better deal for all.

That 600,000 figure was the number shipped, not the number sold. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the words near numbers. Sony is a bit sneaky with that, reporting PS3s, Vitas shipped but not sold sometimes. That number came from somewhere around Fall 2010 and before they yanked the ability to see how many people were in game, the total number of players at peak was pegged at something like 45k or 47k around mid-late Oct 2010. When they pulled the reporting ~Dec 2010, it was somewhere in the 20ks. With numbers like that, it would take a lot of people trying it in the free period to go through somewhere in the neighborhood of 550,000 unsold copies (might be more. I think the number might have been 660,000 shipped).