Playing FFXI At Work

So i have a lot of downtime, thinking about dropping ff on my work pc and playing. Question is..will it be a big bandwidth eater for a company with ~200 employees, all of whom have full browsing capability (no sites are cut off, they do give us fairly free reign here, lax culture). Some people get away with watching movies on Netflix. We run a T1 connection. Our IT dept is fairly non-existent...its contracted to an outside/third party who only comes in when we have issues...otherwise our VP of Ops handles the little stuff.

Friend says FFXI is still a bandwidth eater mainly because its an MMO. Definitely dont want to get fired, just have a lot of downtime of late.

Do not play at work. Don't be that guy.

Should be fine. When we have connection issues at work and they force us to cut on the leeching, FFXI has never been an issue.

That being said the connection we run is kinda... from another realm.

FFXI has very low bandwidth usage because everything is loaded from your PC and only locations and commands are sent.

Well actually no, it isn't a bandwidth eater. It was made a over a decade ago and being a 2ed generation MMO the devs learned from the 1st generation.

One big problem in the 1st generation was people on broadband had a great advantage over people on dialup and not many had broadband. So FFXI is choked to 56K/sec.

Personally I would never install a game on a work computer. I might bring a portable hard drive or a huge flash drive though.

If you play FFXI at work you're basically giving them carte blanche to can you if you get caught. You might not care right away but that is the sort of Termination For Cause that stays with you.

EDIT: I'm not necessarily saying you'd get fired, at least not the first time you got caught; in fact, if you're at all valuable to your company* I would be surprised if they did. But you bet your *** it's ending up in your personnel file, it'll come up at performance reviews, it will most likely cost you a raise, it will DEFINITELY cost you promotion, and let's just say you're going to have to be cautious with your references down the line.

You can whine about how you have all this free time, or how everybody else does the same sort of ***, or about how your supervisor is a really cool, laid back guy, but this is how it is. If you don't like it, blame all the MBAs.




*if you have the time to consider playing ffxi at work you are probably not as valuable as you think you are

Afk getting fired.

It barely eats up anything, I accidentally tethered through my phone for a week and the data was barely noticeable.