Quote Originally Posted by SpankWustler View Post
I don't think anybody else has any idea which group made up the majority, either. I also doubt the player base could be divided neatly into groups. It's so hard to collect data on the mental state of large groups of people that there are statistical tactics for using normally problematic sample sizes to get representative results in the social sciences.

Basically, I have no faith in my ability or anyone's ability to have knowledge of what's good or bad for FFXI players as a whole. If somebody tried to make the point that almost all players hated leveling more than my racist uncle hates brown people, I would find that dubious as well.

It's cool that some people liked leveling at the slower pace. I'm glad somebody really liked it to balance out how much I hated it. I just find any implication of a "silent majority" to be very, very, very suspect and one or both sides always make that implication when this topic comes up.
You could say it's because the game's old, outdated graphics, what-have-you and that's the reason the game is 'dying'; But on the other hand, you could say that (Your sig is really distracting! haha) it's just as likely that the game changed in a few major ways (Abyssea/99 cap) that OG players weren't keen on and those facts are equally responsible in the decline of player numbers and re-subscribers.

It's a given to say that the game had aged by the time WoTG released, but it had aged gracefully. So much that when FFXIV released, many, many players migrated over expecting more great things from SE. Unfortunately we all know how that went, and you had (and still do) their players wanting to recapture the gameplay they had known for years only to realize that it was nowhere to be found.