Can we end this?

[Onidemon]

500k players is very, very good for an MMO (and actually FFXI broke a million at its peak). You seem to be basing your value of success on WoW. You're right that it is less appealing now, but that's to be expected because it's old and has newer competition. That doesn't mean that the core mechanics of the game are bad or that the game is niche. It's just getting to the end of its expiration date, as everything does.

I remember seeing a gaming magazine back then who claimed FFXI had reached a 5 million players base. But the issue here is that FFXI does not appeal at all to casuals which are the biggest part of the market. As for the hardcore it is something like 30-40%. The game is focused on you spending 1h looking for a party and then grinding 1 type of monster for maybe days to get 5-10 levels. then move to a new area and repeat. The type of gameplay appeals to very few players.

[Jennestia]

I remember seeing a gaming magazine back then who claimed FFXI had reached a 5 million players base. But the issue here is that FFXI does not appeal at all to casuals which are the biggest part of the market.

A lot of the shooters out currently aren't for the casual friendly playerbase -- Halo was largely considered the casual shooter, but games like CoD and Battlefield have multiple million player base (let's not forget CSS) so no the biggest market is both casual and hardcore a like.

XI had 2 million + characters but only ever reached around 1.1 million subscription base. You never spent "days" grinding 1 type of monster to gain 5-10 levels, even back in 2003-2006, you spent hours max unless your party was performing badly. It only ever slowed down in the 50s which was nearing end-game. You spread a lot of misinformation to try to paint XI in a worse light.

[Tigercub]

I remember seeing a gaming magazine back then who claimed FFXI had reached a 5 million players base. But the issue here is that FFXI does not appeal at all to casuals which are the biggest part of the market. As for the hardcore it is something like 30-40%. The game is focused on you spending 1h looking for a party and then grinding 1 type of monster for maybe days to get 5-10 levels. then move to a new area and repeat. The type of gameplay appeals to very few players.

Which is why nobody is asking for that aspect of FFXI. In place of ideas that failed in FFXIV, some of us want the stuff from FFXI that did appeal to people, enough so that even casuals like myself were drawn to it despite these flaws (exaggerated though they may be). I played FFXI casually for six years, and to be honest most of the people I met in game played casually too.

[Onidemon]

Which is why nobody is asking for that aspect of FFXI. In place of ideas that failed in FFXIV, some of us want the stuff from FFXI that did appeal to people, enough so that even casuals like myself were drawn to it despite these flaws (exaggerated though they may be). I played FFXI casually for six years, and to be honest most of the people I met in game played casually too.

I saw a thread this week asking for exactly that. "Plz bring back the grinding camps, we want to spend hours grinding 1 monster and that's all FFXIV needs to be saved" and there was like over 20 likes....