Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[ScreamingInDigital]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

EQ, SWTOR and LoTRO still offer a subscription option. As long as they maintained a sub option (in the event of such a switch happening, which I doubt at this point... but who knows, SE has been known to go from one extreme stance to another before), I think it'd be okay.

They need to stay the hell away from NCSoft's "Truly Free (to nickel and dime you to death)" setup. It's an abomination. I used to be a huge Lineage 2 player, for several years, and loved the hell out of that game. Then they did the whole "Goddess" expansion, switched to a fully F2P/Cash Shop model. They lied through their teeth in their lead-up PR, claiming that only non-game/stat effecting items would be sold (claiming they understood how such items in a PvP setting like L2 could be disastrous). They then proceeded to start selling such items almost from day one, changing their logic from "won't happen" to "well, they're optional!" They said this full knowing that in a competitive game like that, people will spend money - lots of it - to get an advantage over their rivals. People had been buying Adena, for just that reason, for years already in that game, so they didn't even have to 'test the waters' to find out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when setting up the F2P model for that game, and "Heavy Handed" doesn't even begin to describe it. Worst P2P to F2P transition I've ever seen. It went from being a game I played and loved for years, to "get the hell off my computer" in less than a week.

They did the same thing with Aion.

I don't believe, at all, though, that FFXI needs to go F2P. What FFXI needs is some serious thought and reconsideration of the direction they've chosen to take it. Trying to go with the vertical progression approach is just not going to fly. It's been proven time and again that developers can not crank out new content fast enough to stay ahead of players. Developers repeatedly underestimate their players and think they can somehow "stay ahead". It never works. SE's model of long-term progression with a "lateral" approach, rather than "vertical", served FFXI wonderfully for years. Yes, people complained about it... but they kept playing and the game maintained a healthy population for over 7 years before any kind of a noticeable decline began, which I would contend had more to do with the game's age at that point than anything else. Even then, XI's population decline was far slower than most any other comparable MMO out there (sub-based, etc).

SE could have stayed the course, continued creating content the way they did, and I believe the game would have remained healthier and the population wouldn't have dropped as it did. Instead, they decided to hop on the "mainstream MMO" bandwagon and start changing the game to be more like others (which they'd successfully avoided doing all those years prior). As I said in my last post, they decided to mix oil into water, and the results have been self-evident.

The population is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I don't think I've ever seen so many people as disappointed and upset about the direction of the game in all my time playing it.

They can't go back to Abyssea. They already raised the cap to 99 and, other than the "faux levels" granted through gear, there's only so far they can go in that direction.

I think they need to go back to their roots, look at what they did in those past expansions that kept people engaged and loyally playing for years. One thing I can guarantee they'll find is that their focus was far more on community, on lateral progression and on giving players challenges that weren't outright grinds, but that still took time to accomplish because they were difficult to do. Make old content relevant again for its own sake.

For their part, the playerbase has to get off this gear obsession they've been on. Every other complaint I see sometimes is something to do with getting new gear. This is the product of SE trying to turn the game into a vertical-progression setup. As Stompa said perfectly earlier in the thread, the fun of playing FFXI used to be playing FFXI. SE needs to look back to their own past, see what they did right, find a way to bring it to the present, and get themselves back on the right track. They're just getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with the decisions they've been making over the last few years.

FFXI was originally envisioned as a grand adventure, not a race to "end game". They need to return to that vision.

My 2 gil, and of course, my opinion.