Development Team Downsizing and Justification Makes no Sense

[Alhanelem]

Yes and where is the evidence that XIV had nothing to do with that?

Do successful healthy games that are growing have server merges when the game that was supposedly going to take its players bombed and got pulled from the market? Doesn't make any logical sense to me. But what the hell do I know?

There's no way FFXIV caused that. FFXI was already going through rough times. 2011 was when Dynamis was changed and when Voidwatch came out, on the heels of abyssea, which is widely blamed by players for the game's decline.

It is thought by some that Abyssea being the crazy power playground that it was, made future content far less exciting and fun purely because abyssea made you feel so much more powerful, and then new content comes out and gives you a pale imitation of the power you had in Abyssea. Not everyone agrees with this exact explanation, but you can dig through these forums and others and find lots of debates on this where people blame Abyssea.