My continued support of FFXI, and SE as a company.

[Alhanelem]

Yes money speaks, but only at the point of purchase

Every real person laying this game gives them money every month. Our money speaks long after the point of initial purchase.

Between the two MMOs, over two decades I've given SE thousands of dollars. multiply that by all the players who potentially become regulars- it's not an insignificant amount.

While the bots are a lot of free money for SE (and seemingly a reason they aren't in a big hurry to action them), so are the players.

Source? Don't forget that the reason XIV outpaced XI was also due to the massive amount of money they poured into XIV.

No source, it's my guesstimation. Money invested is also not important for this argument. Consider: let's just say FFXI and FFXIV sold the exact same number of copies initially. As Dawntrail releases, assuming similar player retention (in reality there is a big difference here because FFXI has drastically slowed content release compared to FFXIV), at this point their sales are equal. Each future expansion FFXIV releases (we know there will be at least one more for sure since they've already planned that far ahead, even if they don't invest in FFXIV's staying power to the level that Blizzard has in WoW) puts its sales ahead.

Look, I know we all want to give FFXI every advantage because its our beloved game (Yes, mine too), but we need to be honest with ourselves.

Also: Investment isn't a guarantee of success. Online games as we know them today were in their relative infancy when FFXI debuted- there's no guarantee that simply giving FFXI the budget they gave FFXIV would have produced the same sales numbers. It could have done better, it could have done worse. There's really no way to tell. At the time FFXI has begun to lose its luster in the eyes of at least some of the playerbase, it was still getting regular new content and a new expansion was still yet on the way- but the decline was already happening and SoA didn't really stave it off that much. Audolin technically has an airship landing, marked on the map like any of the others but it was never utilized, and some of its features got downsized when it wasn't as successful as hoped. And it is probably for this reason they started winding things down the way they did.