Would An American Company Do It?

Typically businesses have a back up location for these type of emergency's

Also this is why having all your servers in 1 location is pretty *** stupid. (EU/US/Asian servers like other MMO's)

Anyways lets hope everything goes to plan and it only takes 1 week for them to sort things out.

If not, that they attempt to set up a temporary location.

If they don't set up a new location oh well they are going to lose $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

And they would have gotten away with it if not for that meddling 8.9 magnitude earthquake.

All your examples of volunteerism are the United States government. I didn't see Walmart or Exxon with people on the ground helping rebuild. "We are a very unselfish nation overall", you have to be out of your mind. Take the blinders off there kiddo, because you don't become the biggest superpower in the world without being selfish. Don't jump on a forum, call a bunch of people ignorant and unintelligent (see, there is no hyphen) because you are naive and uninformed.

Yet again, the only reason 99.9% of American corporations would do something morally correct is to protect their image. If they could pull it off and not get caught, they would.

Even though japanese plps have lot of defauts (racism is prob one of the most pissin), you have to admit they also have somethin LOT of countries would want : civism!
Just go in japan and u'll see it : town are cleans (well as much a town can be w), u have to be caution of your suroudin, and u cant do anythin you want everywhere...
And compare to this USa have...well you know...liberty ? lolz
Peoples education is just totally different in japan, they have to clean their school (ask this to a french or USA students today and u'll see their reaction...), they can participate to town cleanin some days (another country can say it ?? i think no...)etc.
So japaneses peoples DO care about their country as a SOCIETY, when other country are more about INDIVIDUALS...and USA is the KING of "man made himself", but these kind of guys, winners of capitalism, in time of disaster are also the first one to kill his friend for survive instead of help other.

Thess kinds of things change a lot the way you see a society and what u can do for it or not...

And that blasted tsunami too!

Typical businesses on the relevant scale stand to lose millions of dollars for every hour they're down as opposed to SE and FFXI where the inconvenience is likely far outweighed by not having to manage and staff a set of backup servers.

Didn't someone say the servers are all in CA. Or did we just debunk this?

The nature of the disaster is such that I'm pretty sure US companies would do the same if asked.

I really wouldn't read too much into this one. Server farms like 11/14's require enormous amounts of energy, and would likely be among the first facilities asked to shut down by either the government or the utility company itself.

They are not in California.

Trust us. ;)

The servers are in Japan and always have been. If you remember the very beginning of the game, JPs had a distinct advantage because the servers were closer to them then us. They fixed this when they built a lag into the Japanese client.

There are no servers in CA.

Yeah I always thought they were in Japan then someone was saying CA, I can't find the post now, but oh well.

On topic I think it would be up to the utility companies to cut off power when needed to.

Yah, this actually reminded me a bit of the rolling blackouts that California faced back in 2001. Although those had more to do with issues such as aging electrical infrastructure vs. demand, deregulation, and price gouging by energy brokers like Enron and not a natural disaster, the "mandatory rolling blackouts" that affected both residents and industries were very similar. Because of the size of the affected areas and the limits between purchasing electricity between neighboring states, the California rolling blackouts were also very similar in scope.

As mentioned in this article of the time...

http://news.cnet.com/Rolling-power-blackouts-darken-California/2100-1017_3-251091.html

...those companies that did not have the infrastructure in place (redundant data and telecom systems, backup generators, etc.) to accommodate were indeed affected and literally left in the dark. The ones here in Silicon Valley cited I read were Sun Microsystems and even parts of Apple's Cupertino campus, while others mentioned like Loudcloud were still operational due to backup power.

So while things are very likely different in 2011, I think depending on the size of the company that compliance with a general directive like this, especially in a state of emergency, is pretty much mandatory and the effects would be identical (again, depending on the company) in the US.

As mentioned several times in this thread and by others (including myself) in other threads, co-location is prohibitively expensive and it isn't surprising that SE didn't have such backup in place for a subscription-based server system. I am guessing their corporate and revenue-generating marketing websites were/are backed up, though.

This is incorrect information generated by a poorly read headline. The headline said "At least 160 people tested for radiation" - Note, it does not say they tested positive. The 160 were tested, to determine if they had radiation poisoning.

It's hard to compare the US and Japan in this situation. Japan is smaller than California and has four times the population.

They have to make greater use of less resources than we have.

If such a crisis was to occur here - a company would have a much easier time of finding another temporary base of operations during the recovery period if necessary.

Good god... you act as if SE is a carebear and doesn't hold money as its main goal. Stop being such a weeaboo.

I didn't read anything else besides the OP so sorry if someone else posted this.
I'm from New Orleans and was here during Katrina and the same thing was asked from people here and everyone complied to my knowledge. The electric company had people dedicated to just go house to house and business to business to flip the outside breakers. I had a lot of friends come back after a month or so that just thought they lost power until I told them to go flip the breaker.

there are numerous console games that run completely free servers that handle way more people then ffxi has. they are funded only by the initial purchase of the game, and usually those servers are in more then one country. even games considered "dead" like MAG for example. the idea that SE is unable to provide more then one server location is garbage. it all comes down to money which SE has made plenty of from this game over the years

Servers like that are essentially single box machines which run completely independently and of each other maybe with one or two servers in each region doing matchmaking. They might have to do some reporting of statistics but that's not super important.

FFXI on the other hand has one server per zone (though they may have consolidated with virtual servers over the years, dunno) as well as a bunch of auxiliary servers for stuff like search/AH/POL. All this stuff has to be kept relatively synced with databases and with each other. SLIGHT difference in complexity of systems and management of it all.

Edit: Seems like it's not quite 1 server per zone from what I can google (some sharing) but still a LOT of servers for each world.

I wouldn't be surprised if the physical servers are still the same ones the game has been on since launch with little to no upgrades

Nobody has said they can't. What we have put forward is the idea that it was (correctly, imo) deemed a poor use of resources.

And for-profit companies are clearly all about throwing money away rather than putting it into profitable ventures or their own pockets. There has to be a net gain or backup servers flat-out are not worthwhile. It's a game, not a database of medical files. They can afford to be down for a week.

There was at least one instance of them taking the servers down for upgrade/replacement. That was probably something like 6-7 years ago? I can't recall.

In most situations a company would backup their data (given SE's business in this case is an online entity constantly played 24/7, slightly different issue but...) to preserve any records in order to continue to function after a disaster and it's aftermath has been taken care of. This applies for almost any company regardless of national origin, as far as business matters, I'd be inclined to say that given exact same operating conditions...yes an American based company would shut down services. In the off chance that a company would refuse, more than likely, a government order would take place requiring them to follow emergency energy conservation regulations...