Nabutso wrote:
Nas isn't going to be moving on nor can the server grow "too big". He's spent $40k on hardware alone and has run into massive issues with how dsp works given such a large server. Every single server starts off promising things that other servers don't have - then they take donations, have GMs, a 'team', and it all falls apart. Nas's best feature is the fact that, among all this doomsaying, as server rise and fall, he has been around - and never took donations, and removed drama, etc.
He gets shit on for "bad uptime" even though he's built a generator shed and got 0 sleep for 4 days in a row because he needed to refuel it after storms took out power to his whole house. Meanwhile other servers shut down permanently because they just didn't feel like it anymore. Servers that took people's money. That have now cost it's players hundreds of thousands of hours of playtime collectively. Nas doesn't do that and won't do that.
He'll accept help only once he really needs it. People had the same criticisms now as they did a year ago when we had 500 players: "How can nas handle them all? He NEEDS help NOW! Other servers do X so much better!". Most servers don't make it to the 1 year mark, let alone the 5.5 nas has, and building a server off of creating features that other servers don't have as your only selling point isn't going to end well for them. Never has. As far as help goes? That's up to him. He isn't going to see the server crash and burn out of stubbornness. The dudes not perfect but he knows what he's doing (it helps that I talk to him about it daily and get an insight into that though).
Stay tuned for the Q&A and you may understand better why things are the way they are, maybe why things were so slow this past year as far as nas's activity. This isn't normal for him, and yet he's still accomplished a lot.
Listing all the crazy shit Nas goes through to keep this thing running on his own doesn't really sell the "He doesn't need help!", argument very well...

My point was simply that so long as Nasomi remains the only viable option for the classic FFXI community, he's going to face criticism from people who feel their hobby is threatened by his decisions.
There is little chance that another private server will take off in any meaningful way so long as Nasomi exists, and with so much of the community being invested in Nasomi for so long, there's also no guarantee that enough players would start over on another server even if/when Nasomi shuts down... which means that a lot of crazy classic FFXI fans are super invested in/worried about how Nasomi is running things.
Nabutso wrote:
Nas isn't going to be moving on nor can the server grow "too big".
Maybe
you have the insight to be able to make this claim comfortably, but no one else does. Nasomi almost never interacts with the community anymore, so all the average player gets is long periods of mostly radio silence, occasionally broken by unverifiable secondhand info from another player who simultaneously claims to be in the loop, but not
so in the loop that they're an actual server authority... and then sudden, absolute changes (with obscure descriptions) that seem to come out of nowhere and totally shake up the server - often breaking as much as they fix. Not exactly a setup that builds confidence.
Like I said before, most of us appreciate the hell out of Nasomi for what he does - we just want this server to do well because at this point, frankly, we're shit out of luck with this hobby if it doesn't.
Hence all the offers to help, suggestions and complaints.