One of the reasons WoW had 14 million subscribers

[Menubrea]

...I'm pretty sure WoW got that popular because it was released when the MMO genre was still incredibly unpopular and with the name of Blizzard and the IP Warcraft, they managed to pull in many new gamers into the world of MMOs and then it just spread like a wildfire.
The MMO selection back then was incredibly small and limited, so a game like WoW could stand out easily.

There will "never" be another MMO that is released now or in the future that will pull in 11.8m+ subscribers unless it's a revolutionary MMO, so pulling in 1 million is still an incredibly successful MMO.

World of Warcraft had so many subscribers because it was a good game. World of Warcraft still have the most subscribers because it remains a good game.

The IP, company name and the era might have drawn people in, but they stayed because it was and still is a great MMO experience.

[Lycanar]

Its not 14 millions. It is a lot less. Update yourself.

You are correct, they capped out around 12.5 million world wide at the height Post Cataclysm. Never had 14.

They currently have around 7.7 million world wide.

[AridElf]

Off topic. The thread you quote complains about waiting a little time between skills, like a hidden cooldown. The problem here is the time between entering the command and starting the animation, like a delay. And it happens even if it's the only skills you're using.

I never come across anything like that delay you mention unless my internet is slow. People are most likely hammering the skill keys constantly and expecting it to ignore the GCD and fire off anyway.

[Balaur]

OP's not wrong though. Instant abilities are weird in this game, especially when trying to get them off between non-instant attacks

Virus>Thunder II>Raging Strikes>Swiftcast>FireIII>FireI spam. Practically three moves alone.

[Shan]

Actually XIV has more active player than WOW now (1m vs 500-600k)
http://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/us

WOW is dying

[Obysuca]

I thought one of the reasons were chinese players or RMTs / Bots?

I heard back at one point, they counted those as part of their player base too. Also read somewhere that they counted each character as a "player".

Pretty sure it has to do with them shoving 50 ads down your throat a day lol Can't go anywhere and not see 10+ ads for it. Now imagine if SE had actually advertised for XI / XIV, instead of 1-2 commercials and stopping (in NA at least)

[Linadae]

WoW has done so well because it was a Perfect Storm situation. The older 'hardcore' mmos like Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, and Ultima Online were losing players to burn out. More people than ever before had home internet access/high speed internet access and computers worth playing video games on. Blizzard was a popular, dependable, and caring game company. And finally the Warcraft IP had a strong following.

Put all of that together and add in WoW's formula of accessible play (meaning you can log on for an hour and get something done) and easy-to-learn ui and you basically had a game that couldn't fail.

It's not so easy now. Currently the market is flooded with mmos using the same/similar user friendly UI. And with things being even more casual friendly there is less burn out. So really the only thing that keeps subscriber retention is the IP.

It's why Star Wars is still limping along despite the worst launch in mmo history, toxic community, and being squeezed for every penny by EA. People play it because it's Star Wars.

The same goes for Age of Conan.

Rift however is an anomaly. I'm going to go with the fact that from the very beginning Trion earned customer loyalty by admitting to any and all mistakes made and making restitution. Even now with them being free to play they continue to give things to players whenever there is a connection issue or coding mistake.

Final Fantasy XIV has had a good start. It's launch, even with the connection issues) was the smoothest I've ever seen since Rift. More people are piling onto the servers everyday. Yes there are issues like instant cast abilities that are either a DoT or have a cooldown, really don't need to trigger the global cooldown. But they are more annoying than gamebreaking.

So far every patch has seen the game get better. Yoshida and the rest of the development team have been killing themselves to bring us the best game ever and it shows. I for one look forward to see what new improvements they are going to pull out of their hats. We just need to be patient and calm down. Give them time to test the game in action so they can continue to make this one of the best games on the market.

[Kopuno]

You know Rift has less players than FFXI right ?

Sure they are still making money, but when EA/Bioware made SWTOR do you really think they would be ok with 500k people ? same for Tera ?
There is a good reason why they went F2P because they pretty much failed and the subsciption model wouldn't get them their money back fast enough.

Making games these days is much more expensive then when FFXI and WoW first came out, businesses have to make their money back otherwise shareholders won't be happy.

I love this one. Let me remind you why SE nor Blizzard will never HAVE to go F2P. When a company makes a game they have to have investors to help foot the bill. If the game isn't a huge success and the said company is not making enough money to support its employees, servers, teams and the big one INVESTORS the company has to go F2P. F2P is great for short term burst of Income, because the typical F2P player will come in, spend a couple hundred dollars then leave a month later. However, here we have Blizzard and SE. Neither, need investors to make their products. SE uses it's own cash (which is funded by many other sources of income. As they have many different places to draw from. Game Titles and such) and therefore can easily make a profit from 500k users.

As for the topic at hand, anytime I fire off an instant ability it is indeed instant. IF I am not trying to do it while a current ability is playing through. I can understand how people would compare it to "other" MMO's, but this isn't "other" MMO's and is built this way for reasons.

[Raim]

I don't personally care about WoW, but I do find threads like this hilarious when the majority of arguments posted against criticism to the game are "Whatever, we don't need you. Just leave!" How many people do you have to tell to leave before its just a handful of you? Why don't you actually address the arguments? Just remember what happened to FFXIV prior to Realm Reborn.

[Chiruru53]

I'll love this game even more when they fix the garbage loot system.