Server merge inevitable?

FFXI has a lot of life left in it provided SE stops the constant meddling at the top without reworking the bottom. They absolutely do need to finish SoA, but at the same time they need to breathe in some new life to some of that older content they've been sweeping under the rug since the advent of Abyssea, things that anyone who has been around this game for quite awhile used to do every chance we could. Sea, Sky, Dynamis, Campaign, Besieged to name a few, these could all have SoA strengths added to the mobs. Once they fix that horrible mistake they made of outdating all the gear in one fell swoop I hope they do bring this stuff back as quickly as possible, because let's face it, this constant 6-18 man instanced stuff is kind of lame, we should have big groups on grand adventures again.

FFXI is running it course, To the end or to the smaller community in general. People age just like the game has aged. FFXI as went through it fine wine stage . With the abyssea content that brought a lot old players back and new players. Now it time for them just make the game fun and just keep there smaller community going.

FFXIV were many have move onto or other mmo's over the last few years. It the golden Age of choices when it comes to mmos now days from free to play. To the few that understand subscription base models.

One of the biggest flaws that going on with both FFXI and FXIV is there not making no reason for the elite players or there hardcore players to go back and do the older contents to get the good weapons. It just kill one boss for drops or farm same stuff over and over on the new weapons or gear, and everyone get same weapons or gear. No longer having to do old contents or stuff that you did work for over the long haul is worthless.

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Originally Posted by Dragoy

At around 1500+ during European afternoon slash Japanese evening on Fenrir, down to 400-600 or so roughly at the NA times I think.

I could see servers merging, and I have decided that Asura will be merged with Fenrir. In addition to that, I could see the game going Japan exclusive...

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I would welcome you to Fenrir, but we are going to rename Asura/Fenrir as Unicorn again. :D Bwahahaha.

At this point server merging feels a lot like being in a sinking boat and people suggesting the passengers all sit close together. The boat will sink if the hole isn't fixed. People are saying 14 is the reason and I don't know if that is correct. What it felt like to me was the game was forcing me to use this one specific weapon for my job and to have this one specific gear set; make the old gear obsolete and eliminate gear swapping with these ilevel stats. That has never been 11. I always found WoW and Aion and other similar MMO's to be simplistic, even 14 feels like this. 11 has always been about finding that one piece of gear that will boost this one stat to make this weapon skill hit that much harder. And to get that gear I will have to crawl through hell on my knees to get it. It's not about that now. I could have been gone from the game for 3 years and within 3 hours I could have some of the best gear in the game for my job. The hardest part of getting gear now is getting to Skirmish camp that 1st time.

I did the cliche thing and went to 14 with the 90% of my linkshell and that community seems to be growing. Traded in my pearl for a Free Company with 65 people on on a slow day and 300 on a normal day. So what could SE do to make me return to 11? Probably nothing at this point. 11 will not shut down, I see it being sold off to some second-tier software company, have the FF name stripped off and made into an FTP.

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Originally Posted by Splinters

At this point server merging feels a lot like being in a sinking boat and people suggesting the passengers all sit close together. The boat will sink if the hole isn't fixed. People are saying 14 is the reason and I don't know if that is correct. What it felt like to me was the game was forcing me to use this one specific weapon for my job and to have this one specific gear set; make the old gear obsolete and eliminate gear swapping with these ilevel stats. That has never been 11. I always found WoW and Aion and other similar MMO's to be simplistic, even 14 feels like this. 11 has always been about finding that one piece of gear that will boost this one stat to make this weapon skill hit that much harder. And to get that gear I will have to crawl through hell on my knees to get it. It's not about that now. I could have been gone from the game for 3 years and within 3 hours I could have some of the best gear in the game for my job. The hardest part of getting gear now is getting to Skirmish camp that 1st time.

I did the cliche thing and went to 14 with the 90% of my linkshell and that community seems to be growing. Traded in my pearl for a Free Company with 65 people on on a slow day and 300 on a normal day. So what could SE do to make me return to 11? Probably nothing at this point. 11 will not shut down, I see it being sold off to some second-tier software company, have the FF name stripped off and made into an FTP.

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Maybe it should be sold to a second-tier software company because the way it's being run right now it might as well be.

There's going to be a server merge, of that I have no doubt, but the question is will it be too late at that point to keep the game afloat, earlier today I did a /sea all on Bahamut and there were 554 chars logged in, that's down roughly 300 from last month, and 1k overall since ffxiv was realeased. If they don't do a server merge pretty soon, people are going to keep abandoning ship simply because they don't have other people to do stuff with, and who wants to play an mmo when they can't get anything done for lack of a group?

Well that's really the issue now. Adoulin has had only 3 real pieces of content, WKs, Skirmish, and Delve, while its been out around 7 months now, 2 sets of WKs, 2 sets of Skirmish, and 1 set of Delve, less than 1 real new piece of content each month. While a new FF game came out which was a MMO, and the game underwent a massive direction/development change which turned away a great deal of people. We are at the point where the game is losing people because the game is old, changing to much, and doesn't have enough content to make people want to stay, at the same time, the lower population is making it harder to do the new events, 1 of which asks for an Alliance, and the other which asks for multiple alliances.

People cant get a group because a lot of people already finished what there is to do, and don't want to do it anymore, while the people who are looking for a group either cant win, or cant gather the others to do it. Its just making the game fall apart faster. We need a lot of new content to keep people going since all of the old content got outdated and at the same time need server merges to gather enough people on servers to actually do the content too.