If the servers are down for a while will people come back?

[TonyMontana]

So now that the servers are going to be offline for anywhere between one week and several months how bad will this effect the population of FFXIV? I know several people who were on the fence about the game and were playing it because it was there and free. Now that the servers are down tho people will be forced to find something else to do. For many people that will mean trying a new game or maybe going back to an old MMO they used to play. So when the servers do come back online do you think these events will cripple the FFXIV population and make it even smaller than before?
Yes I know the 5k-10k white knight / fanboiswill come back as soon as the servers are up but im actually talking about the other people who dont live for this game.

[Abriael]

Considering that the vast majority of people comes and goes regularly whether the game is there or not (even more the ones that you don't, rather stupidly, define "fanboys or "white knights" in an poorly veiled attempt to preemptively flame. Since, you know, most people out there don't devote their life only to one game), yes, they are going to come back.
And if they don't come back immediately, they will on the first patch, or the second, or another that piques their curiosity, or the PS3 release, alongside a whole lot of other people.

Most of the people that were interested in quitting, already did.

[viion]

It might ruin the population a little, the problem is usually if a game went down the development team could still work on it, sadly that isnt the case here, its a complete stand-still for everything.

I will probably not come back on until the next major patch but that is due to the game itself and not my time away, but i was already not coming on prior to this event.

Many of my friends do not care currently the state of the game and only considering coming back when the game has been solved. (September onwards).

Sadly though I stopped playing XIV as much because I started up again on XI and now i cant even do that haha so I think I will spend my time getting a lot of work and things out the way during this downtime.

[Azurymber]

Most of the people still playing the game are prob playing because they are fan boys. So many will probably come back (myself included).
But for those who were looking forward to improvements and only playing and hoping for news, its a different story. If the game is down for too long people will get bored and try out new MMO's. They will make new friends there, generate new goals, etc. As a result, when FFXIV comes back up, they will have to choose whether to split time between the 2, or focus on one game (and choose a game). Since FFXIV lacks content it is likely they will choose the other game.

So there is a good chance the population will drop.
But FFXIV has years of life in it, so eventually people will come back and it will rise again.

[Medura]

Il be back in a week, you be sure :P I had waited for the weekend to play now this whole week, being happy that the servers stayed up even with natural disasters going, but not understanding why .. i have accepted the wait and il be glad when theire up again, but i also know it might even take a month if things stays as bad as they are. Something they hopefully wont

[Abriael]

sadly that isnt the case here, its a complete stand-still for everything.

People in Tokyo still go to work. There's absolutely no signal that development has been stopped, or even paused. The development team doesn't need the servers up in order to work. Shutting down the server doesn't mean that they shut down square enix, barred the doors and went home.

[TonyMontana]

Considering that the vast majority of people comes and goes regularly whether the game is there or not (even more the ones that you don't, rather stupidly, define "fanboys or "white knights" in an poorly veiled attempt to preemptively flame. Since, you know, most people out there don't devote their life only to one game), yes, they are going to come back.
And if they don't come back immediately, they will on the first patch, or the second, or another that piques their curiosity, or the PS3 release, alongside a whole lot of other people.

Most of the people that were interested in quitting, already did.

So you dont think a month or two of being forced to play another MMO(if MMO play is their chosen means of entertainment) could lead people to quitting FFXIV? As far as you being sure people will come back does that include the roughly 90% of the games population who have quit before the servers went down?

[Reika]

I will definitely be back. I can list a few names that I hope do not return however....

[AlexiaKidd]

I hate to say it but I think it might cause a few people to leave, maybe they will go try other recently released MMO's and decide they like that better or something like that. It's a shame but in all honesty I wouldn't be surprised if SE decided to keep the servers down for sometime after this. I mean they are getting no money from sub's anyway so they are not going to lose money from that and they will save money from not having to run all the servers. They might think it better they cut their losses now and keep working on the redesign and when they have everything fixed and all the work finished then put them back up as a beta to test everything ahead of the PS3 release.

Not saying that will happen but you can be sure someone will have been crunching the numbers to see if it is a viable option, they would be weighing up how much of the player base they would lose that would not return for the relaunch against how much they would save from keeping the servers down. I suppose they would also factor in what it would do to their reputation as a company and if PR would be able to overcome that with a relaunch.

[Abriael]

So you dont think a month or two of being forced to play another MMO(if MMO play is their chosen means of entertainment) could lead people to quitting FFXIV? As far as you being sure people will come back does that include the roughly 90% of the games population who have quit before the servers went down?

First of all, for now they talked about a week. We don't know how the outtage will last, and bandaging your head before it's broken does no good.

The percentage of people that play ONLY MMORPGs is actually quite small. Most people have several ways of gaming entertainment, and many majorly awaited non-mmorpg games have been released or are being released in this period: Dragon Age 2, Shogun 2, Yakuza 3 and so forth.

So no, it's not going to hurt the game in any sizable way. As much as, considering the trends behind your posts, looks like you'd enjoy the perspective.