Another night, another failed attempt at playing this stupid game. Log on...D/C...log on...D/C...over and over again. Didn't this all start on April 9th? April, May, June, July, August, September....it goes on and on and on and on..........

Guess I'll go read a book. Rate me down for the negative post if you like, I don't really care. If you can get on, good. I'm truly happy for you. All I wanted was to log on, cook some Jack 0'Lanterns for a friend who needed them, solo Bard to lvl 7, and go to bed. Is that so much to ask? Blah.

these are so not Ddos attacks, SE have fooked up on the server maintenance again, they just dont wanna look bad, would love to meet SE's IT executive he must be soooo dum! ^-^

Does anybody actually send there ideas to SE, or do we just talk about them here. Its not going to help us at all talking about it here. You do know in the Support part of POL u can snd your ideas to SE. If we flood there box with ideas that sound very simalar it might just get what we want. My idea is each months a 1-2 day maitenance. that will give them plenty of time to fix our problems. I also think that when they come back they shouldnt put up all servers but 1 at a time so the servers dont get flooded and we go back to the horrible lag and such.
I think when we finally get a few minutes on there we should tell them this. Not to add more things to it. Not to raises the cap. But a sceduled maitenance. So we can expect it. That would make it much easier. Yeah I'm mad too I was going to get my RSE today. Only day I had time for. Oh well...

From:PlayOnline
Sep. 8, 2005 11:10 [PDT]

PlayOnline Login Difficulties (Sep. 8): Follow-up 2

This is a follow-up to the previous news regarding PlayOnline login difficulties.

As we stated in the previous news announcement, DDoS attack from the anonymous third parties is still continuing. However with the counter-measures taken by our technicans, login difficulties have been gradually easing.

We will continue investigating the issue and consider all possible measures to bring this matter to a speedy resolution.
We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

[Date & Time]
Sept. 8, 2005 from 5:15(PDT)

[Details]
Unable to log into PlayOnline.

[Affected Services]
PlayOnline

ya i know man.. i still cant get in at all.. and ive been checkin the sites for any kind of word .. but nothing.. i wonder if anyone is online at all or if its just a wide spread login issue .... would be nice if SE would LET US FREAKIN KNOW

OMG can we ever sign in today.. i got up .. couldnt sign in.. ran some errands.. came back couldnt sign in.. went to class.. took a test.. came home.. couldnt sign in.. WTF SE ... you need to reemburse us for time lost .. i dont care if its 30 cents or w/e but my god.. every other day its something goin on .. in the server that you so called computer guru's cant fix the first time.... i couldve done a server clean up and fix by now with my eyes closed while getting humped by jennifer love hewitt.... FIX THIS **** SO WE CAN PLAY
ty

Kill off all mules and give characters more storage space for items. Beit Storage, Mog Safe, or inventory (leaning more toward Storage). Case in point, the average player has at least 2 mules. Meaning that the 66% of all characters in the game are mules. 66% less characters in the game, would be a huge relief on lag issues. But I know there are gonna be flames cause some dumb ******* has been selling Cantarella for the last two months and no one is buying, yet he continues to Bazaar the stupid ****...

Scattershot responses:

Can't have maps on the hard drives; PS2 doesn't have enough room and the PC players can't be trusted.

Lvl 1 mules is where the real gil - I mean cash - comes from. Constantly d/c'ing bazaar mules would be like shooting themselves in the foot. With a cannon. There ain't no profit in it. Besides, they're just sitting there - the good mules, anyway. It's the morons who shout their bazaars that need to be beaten. (Hey - we can SEE the bag! Be quiet and let me shop!)

A central location for the AH? So that at one shot a buyer could wipe out not only the stock of a specific item but set the price history for it at one shot? You didn't really think that through.

Well, that's not really true.... You fail to consider all sides of the problems, mainly the sides that are ripe for exploitation and evil intent.

And as for any idea that depends on player responsibility, just drop it. These are the same players that invented casinos, charge people to lot on rare/ex items, developed fishing bots, speed hacks.... the list goes on. <extremely cynical comments deleted>

As far as a bulletin board for bazaars, that actually is an excellent idea. But in order to make a bulletin board worthwhile, your mule has to be somewhere where people can find it!

Here is my idea:

1. Make a new part of Jeuno solely for bazaars. Then all bazaars would be in one place and upper junco and wherever else wouldn't be so bad.

2. Make separate areas within this new part of junco, or even buildings where each type of crafting bazaar could stay. While a lot of people have various items, there could be a misc. category and others this is just a rough idea. This would make it easier than randomly searching bazaars hoping one has an item from the craft you need. Would narrow down your search at least.

3. D/C anyone in other parts of junco once they are idle for 4, 6, or 12 hours.

4. I think someone mentioned something like a bulletin board that you could look at and see which bazaar was selling it the cheapest. That would also work within the areas designated for each craft. You could perhaps, go to the alchemy bazaar building, look at the bulletin board and see if what you need is selling and for how much. Then either buy it off the board, or just find the bazaar in the area.

Ok that’s all I can think of for now. Numbered them for easier responses to certain parts. Not a computer person by any standard so I wouldn't know if these were possible or extremely hard to program in to the game. Just a way to help the lag in parts of junco and organize the bazaars for easier viewing.

First post, so don't be too hard on me :)


Teffy

If the true heart of the discussion here is the quality of the game then what SE truly needs to do to make it better is one word. "Benchmarking".
For those of you non-business buffs, benchmarking is a process where a company first looks at itself and its quality and then compares itself to how other companies in the same field work and their strengths. The goal is to get ideas from other places to increase the quality and value of the product. In this case the product is FFXI, and the serious problem is the "lag" issues.

I've seen an very simple and effective way to deal with it in Arenasoft's Guildwars which has only 1 server. Yeah that's right 1 server for all those thousands and thousands of people. The way it works is that all the maps all the things in the game are on your computer, not the server. Therefore significantly reducing memory usage. Also every city is divided into districts 1-30 or so depending on how many people are in that city. And then there are foreign districts for Europe and Korea. Now you can manually select a district and even visit foreign ones if you like. Whenever you would enter, the server would select a district with a lower population to keep from crowding. Also if there is a max person limit too, so everyone cannot manually select district 1 thinking that's where everyone will be.

In my opinion this has proved to be brilliant, I play Guild Wars as well (seeing as its free) and find that SE could learn a thing or two from them.

Another idea to clear the monotony of equipment is to add "dyes" to the game to change the color of armors and weapons. Further allowing you to customize your character to the way you would like. Dyes would also stretch the economy further and provide low levels another thing to farm in addition to crystals. And when sold at the AH would revert to original color just as signitures dissapear when sold on the AH.

The best thing you can do really is to flood SE's comment/suggestion with e-mails about how you feel about the game positive or negative. Writing here is ok, but it really doesn't mean anything seeing as the only people reading it can't really change the game. I can't tell you how many rants and discussions I've had with SE peeps whose job is just to answer e-mails and send stuff to their higher ups for consideration.
The more you talk about a specific thing the more likely it will be considered. If 70% of the people playing the game suddenly flooded the SE mailbox about wanting chocobos and an AH in Selbina/Muahara, the more likely it will be considered.

SE will do things to appease the "masses" not 10 or so people. So start sending to them, start flaming them for the stupid **** they pull, and all that stuff. If enough people do then it will make a difference, if not then ******** here isn't going to do a damn thing.

As for this additional maintanence...yeah, I wish they'd get their ******* act together, this is getting a bit old...
/sigh although, we did agree to all the crap that comes with the game when we signed on and game them our creditcard numbers, so we can't legally tell them to do anything. Hang in there, at least this shows they are maintaining the games more than other companies and that they are making an effort (even though its a half-assed one) to improve the game.

/peace <t>
Mil'bereth
Quetzalquatl

There are great suggestions here. Unfortunately, Square probably will not be doing anything to hurt their bottom line. The current system is set up to...

1) create more time that you have to spend in the game to go from Auction House to Auction House, thereby spending more months in the game than you normally would (meaning more monthly fees for SE).
2) have you create extra mules so that SE can rake in the extra real-life cash (if you use the multiple mule AH method like I do).

I'm not saying that SE doesn't care about your game experience. They do. However, they also care about bringing wealth to the shareholder (which is their number one priority, of which customer satisfaction is only a component). As a result, these suggestions will take a back seat any day of the week. Square is not a private company, and the Nikkei analysts will almost always prevail in these matters.

All this being said, I hope SE does listen to us at some point, makes a customer-first decision (for once), and allows for a one-world auction house and bazaar system...

...and I hope SE will rent more login servers during the impending massive October update (those IT n00bs).

Edited, Wed Sep 7 15:31:00 2005

I find that lag is bad in most areas due to the population such as Jeuno. We call that "Lag City" and yet I fail to understand the idea of a 'central' Auction House {since I have a mule in every city accept Norg and Rabao} and really do find it rather nice to break away from my main chara and go to a mule to just get away from all the stuff that is going on where my main chara may be at.

Jeuno has always had lag and always will. With people casting spells and crafting at the Auction Houses that makes things works for the other cities; atleast in my humble opinion.

I have never seen a reason to stand there at the Auction House and craft like a mad person then get upset when someone casts magic around you and you fail. It is just as much your fault for crafting at the Auction House as it is for those that choose to cast magic so close to the Auction House.

I have been in Jeuno going by the Main Auction House late at night United States Eastern Time and seen the same characters standing there as were standing there {without bazaars} that were there in the morning I signed on.

The main reason there is so much lag in places like Jeuno and other places like the Jungles of Kazham is that SE's servers are not adequate to handle all the traffic. SE really needs to update their servers so that they can provide us with better connections and less lag.

What will happen when the new part of the game comes out in November? Prolly more and more lag *le sigh*.

Well thats my 2 gil and 1 Goblin Mask worth but then again it is just an observation of a Mithra with insomnia. Be well all and have fun in your adventures!