FFXIV has lost it's magic

[Aegis]

LOL player retention, even you're now quit XI and subbing to XIV, along with the other ex-XI players here.

Correct.

I'm not sure what you're getting at though. Is your argument that I am a hypocrite by subbing to XIV, quitting XI but advocating XI-style mecahanics? It seems a pretty shallow argument, but let me clarify.

The mechanics of the XI world I and (i may be assuming a bit here, in which case they can correct me) others are pushing for are mechanics that have been discarded in XI also. This triggered quite an exodus of players from XI and started the downward spiral it is now on. If they were still present in XI you would see far fewer XI vets posting on here and this game would have fewer subscribers.

You also make the assumption that people posting here are not actively playing XI also. For me this is true, but for many it is not.

The reason I am personally not still playing XI is that my wife played on 360, but it got red ring of death and I had to replace it. When the time came to reinstall XI the Abyssea expansion disc wouldn't work. SE had stopped selling them and the entire game was focused around Abyssea at that point. So my wife quit XI so we could play together on XIV. I might have quit anyway as Abyssea was starting to turn me off the game.

tl;dr Go back to FFXI if you like it so much would be more of an option if the version of XI we liked was still available. If it were, we would and this would not be a good thing for this game.

Considering that SWG managed to last 8 years after crippling itself, alienating it's own fanbase, and continued to make mistake after mistake? Yes I do believe FF14 can last 9+ years and I do believe SWTOR will be around for awhile as well (considering it's been gaining players recently rather than losing them ever since it's gone F2P not that I play it anymore.)

You understand that when they dropped the subscription model, anyone who created a character since but hasn't played it since then counts as an active account by their reckoning? Hell, I account for two of those acounts and I haven't even looked at the game since December.

As for SWG I joined just before the CU and watched the population drop and the ghost towns appear on every planet. I also watched the NGE decimate it even further, I left two weeks after that update. They survived by slashing the dev team down to a bare bones crew and doing no significant updates, just milked the few remaining people for subs while keeping server costs down. This is not a great example of player retention.

FF14 is the first mmo in a long time to raise in population a few months after launch rather than decrease. Also "Barely beat an 11 year old game." Not a valid argument, why? Most mmos these days have trouble getting 500k subs. Most fall around 130,000 and only go down from there so 600k subs is doing really well in the current market. It's too early to claim that FF14 isn't going to last 10 years this early in it's life. Especially considering that there's still parts in the world that FF14 hasn't launched in yet that can boost it's player base even further.

600k in 2013 is still a much smaller share of the market than XI had in 2003.