Interview - Famitsu Exclusive with Tanaka and Komoto

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Translated by the specialists at zam, here’s an insightful interview into the currently ongoing process of the FFXIV beta test…

- The alpha test has begun and would it be accurate to say that the whole world is watching?  At this stage of testing there is only a limited amount of players, but the development team has taken their first big step.  I’d like to talk about how you feel the test is progressing, and what you hope to accomplish as you go forward.

Tanaka: The current situation for the alpha test is that we have testing time split up into 4 hour blocks for each region — Japan, North America and Europe.  Admittedly, we have not stabilized the server, and the game is not fully playable yet.  We’ve been causing some headaches for our test players who were lucky enough to get chosen for the alpha, but with each update we are improving the game.

- What is causing the server instability?

Tanaka: We have the same amount of testers in each region, but from our experience beta-testing FFXI, we figured only 50% of players would be logging in at the same time.  Additionally, the testers in Japan were all selected as passionate FFXI fans, so they are eager to play, and the percentage of them logging in is extremely high.  The servers don’t crash as often during North American and European tests.
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