Classic server, what's the argument against it now?

[Zarchery]

Well from a pure business perspective, it wouldn't make sense for Square Enix to build and maintain a product that virtually nobody wants.

From a player perspective, it wouldn't make sense to play a game where everything requires an alliance when you barely have the playerbase to build a single party.

[Rainehx]

Classic server, what's the argument for it now?

Given that they stated that the mobile client at first will go no father than COP for a while
there's going to little call for it at all.

Okay controls maybe different(bluetooth controls?) and a smaller screen(hdmi out?) and far from ideal.

Its also viable to develop due to the "new exiting mobile gaming market" rather than a stale older platform.

not saying it a bad idea, I just wouldnt be getting my hopes up and be happy of the possibility the mobile client may bring.

[Zarchery]

Classic server, what's the argument for it now?

I believe the argument for it is "I want it! I know like 5 other guys who want it. Therefore, extrapolating, there must be at least 2,000 people who want it.".

Classic FFXI barely worked in the days when average server population was 3,000. When it did work, it was largely because there weren't many other good options. Now you've got World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. How is it gonna work when it's now 1/5 that? Especially when the population is divided among time zone and language barriers?

[Isal]

A classic server would inevitably experience the same player polarization where the group that got in on the ground level has all the jobs they care about into the upper levels, leaving an inadequate amount of players to form parties with for the stragglers and the curious late-comers. With no Level Sync or Trust system, the income of new players would slow to a trickle. Only so many veteran playerrs are going to be up to power leveling the late-comers (at least, the ones who are fine with leveling with a living-player-trust-system instead of the classic method that people want this kind of server for in the first place) and hopping on unused lvl 1 jobs to party with low levels will only go so far.

On the other end of the polarization, you'll eventually have people quitting because they're done, RL issues, etc, with hardly anyone new coming into the server to replace them, causing the population to drop. Then you're back to square one again.

I have nothing against the idea, I had the same desire with EverQuest, but it's sort of a growing pain when it comes to the nature of MMORPGs. SE is clearly looking to wrap up FFXI while putting out replacements to keep a numbered title of the FF franchise in existance in one form or another. They may feel like we already got our classic/progression server when the game originally launched, and don't see a point in financing a temporary revival of the original experience. Just because other games have progression servers doesn't mean FFXI must, and SE copy/pasted the WoW themepark formula to turn FFXIV from a broken game to a functioning one.

If FFXI Mobile turns out to be a full reboot, and not just a retooling of the client to access the same servers, that's likely to be the closest we're going to get, they're even dubbing it as a first step of the MMMRPG genre, which makes it seem unlikely that they'd suddenly put the work into a progression server that might interfere with FFXI mobile.

[machini]

Oh yeah, I'm gonna go back to 75 cap when it took me 5 hours to get a party 'cause I didn't play a useful job, and it'll take me a whole year to level a useful job, let alone gear it. And maybe, if I do a LOT of gardening, I'll have enough gil in 10 years to make a single relic.

Yeah, no. Please take off the rose-tinted glasses.

Also, Project1999, last time I played it, had roughly 700 people online at a time, and was absolutely horrible because there were a) no low level people to party with, b) half the classes no one wanted, so they were left attempting to solo, or giving up, because of the no-boxing rule.

[Seillan]

Oh yeah, I'm gonna go back to 75 cap when it took me 5 hours to get a party 'cause I didn't play a useful job, and it'll take me a whole year to level a useful job, let alone gear it. And maybe, if I do a LOT of gardening, I'll have enough gil in 10 years to make a single relic.

Yeah, no. Please take off the rose-tinted glasses.

Also, Project1999, last time I played it, had roughly 700 people online at a time, and was absolutely horrible because there were a) no low level people to party with, b) half the classes no one wanted, so they were left attempting to solo, or giving up, because of the no-boxing rule.

Pretty sure there's around twice that population during peak now. I've also never noticed any of the issues you mention, even during the times I played while the server was less populated. The only class I ever heard anyone really complain about was Ranger (because of how lackluster they are in classic) and maybe hybrids because of the xp penalty.

Not that I'm advocating for a FFXI classic server as I personally have no interest in it. Heck, I wouldn't have even came back if not for the addition of Trusts and RoE. The days of going hours without a group on my DRK are not days I ever want to relive. Even EQ wasn't so unforgiving in its heyday because you could still manage to solo on most classes if you knew what you were doing. It wasn't typically efficient in most cases but it was at least an option.

[madmartin]

i'd definitely support a classic server. lvl 75, everything up to and including Aht Urghan. (i would be ok with wotg but a lot of the wotg end game is post 75, mission line reward is lvl 90 ear ring etc so wouldn't work) You would need lvl sync to support lower population, but Fov, GoV and RoE is not needed, that way 6 man leveling groups would exist and their would be enough people to form them. There is more than enough demand for this to work.

Though a community poll probably wouldn't work on these forums as, as shown by whenever a classic server post comes up, everyone still on these forums is still playing current ffxi and thus probably isn't in favor of a classic server. Most people who are in favor are not on these forums.

[Alhanelem]

Any response would be better than no response, but supposition.

I point you to the core reasons why major updates are stopping in the first place (Hint: It's not really about the number of players). Even if they in their hearts wanted to do this, it is probable they would have development issues from the lack of hardware. And yes, there would be development and costs involved in this; it would not be as simple as redistributing old client files (Which, there is no guarantee they still have them. Smart studios do often keep archives of their projects in an SVN but you never know...).

Also I have to agree with others who have said "what time do we go back to? Who decides?" and that it would be difficult to find a consensus. Most people speak of somewhere before level cap increase, but here's the thing: I don't really consider the level cap rise or Abyssea to have been bad things by themselves. The real problem, which the devs admitted, was the "Where do we go from here?". Abyssea was a power playground. It made you feel powerful and it was a lot of fun for a while. The problem came when abyssea reached its conclusion- there was no way any future content could really top or compete with it without simply copying its features (which voidwatch did to some degree). They couldn't just put atma and abyssea content straight into the open world, because that would break the rest of the open world. So basically, they created content which really could not be surpassed, leaving future content unable could not deliver any of the thrills or sense of power that Abyssea had- So when people were done with Abyssea, there was nothing left in the game that could compare, so players left. Eventually they found a fairly decent way to go about it- however, it came way too late.

-- bla bla bla get to the point --

I think that releasing this would be damaging to the current version of the game, which has its share of players enjoying it and whom shouldn't be penalized from development efforts diverted to release this side project. I also wonder how long people would really enjoy the classic version, knowing it would get no updates (otherwise, it would eventually not be classic anymore). I'd think you'd have people getting bored after a while and then the effort invested in it would be wasted.

[Alhanelem]

Also, as has been pointed out: The mobile version of the game will make its way here, and that will probably work to take people back since it's going to initally start with not all of the expansion content avialable. But SE contracted that out to someone else, they're not doing it themselves.

Then why is every MMO under the sun copying Warcraft? FFXIV included. Square have shown that they're willing to copycat things that are successful.

Well, it doesn't always work. Even when it does, the things you notice and like the most tend to be the things that aren't directly taken from WoW. Keep in mind also that WoW itself took plenty of things from games before it. WoW was primarily successful because of marketing- not because it was original, even for its time.

Ultimately, I think marketing was a major issue for SE with FFXI. It was really not marketed very well, especially outside of Japan. FFXIV is doing much better in the marketing department, and I think that's the real reason it's been successful. I got into FFXI originally at its launch because I was tired of waiting for world of warcraft to come out and a friend showed XI to me and I was like "hey that's cool." So I ended up playing FFXI. But once WoW came out and took off, XI's population immediately stagnated. If WoW had come out sooner, FFXI might not have ever been anywhere near as successful as it was.

[nekroturkey]

Classic FFXI barely worked in the days when average server population was 3,000.

There were more people playing classic XI than there are currently playing XI now. Numbers don't lie, people preferred the older style of gameplay. Please provide evidence to the contrary, otherwise everything you say is just opinion/supposition.