Quote Originally Posted by Tigercub View Post
It's hard to take you seriously when you imply FFXI, a highly successful MMO with solid subscription numbers, was niche.
Maybe compared to WoW. Speaking of which, this game will never be the next WoW. It missed that boat a long time ago, and to be honest, I doubt the FF name even has what it takes to draw in the kind of subs that WoW has. WoW is an accident; it achieved some kind of critical mass, it sparked an unexpected social phenomenon and there's no way to replicate that. It is the facebook of MMOs.

It's time to come down to reality. A lot of the creative ideas in FFXIV failed and now have to be replaced with ideas which we know work just to make people reconsider playing. FFXI is a good example of what works and what doesn't and is closer to FFXIV mechanically than other MMOs like WoW and LotRO. This doesn't mean FFXI-2, it just means fixing the stuff that sucks by using working ideas from FFXI (which usually aren't even exclusively FFXI's ideas), not replacing the heart of the game.
It is harder to take you seriously when you didn't know FFXI was and is a niche market. It managed to get 5mil players at it's best but that was when it started out and there was barely any competition and it was the only mmo to come out for the very succesful PS2. Once WOW and other mmos came out that number went down very quickly and FFXI never got more then 500k players. It was succesful during it's time only because it didn't have much competition and now it is a game that appeals to very few hardcore gamers which is what a niche is.