The only reason I stuck with XIV is because it's free until people are "satisfied", and I want to see how long it takes to improve. Really. To be entirely honest, unless SE gets their butts in gear I'm going to completely drop XIV for Guild Wars 2 once it's released. Now that's a game that looks quality.

I'm very, very disappointed in SE as far as development goes. I've been playing XIV since Alpha last February... and I can tell you right now, this game hasn't made much progress past Beta 1. All the things they are implementing now should have been in the beta phases... not after release. I honestly think it is completely asinine of SE to release XIV in the state it was and not expect negative backlash. The game had no content whatsoever aside from the main storyline and leves at launch. That was it. Nothing else. For being a next-gen MMO, XIV is by far one of the least impressive MMO's I've seen content-wise.

Now, granted... XI and WoW have had a lot of time to develop over the years which is why they have so much more content... but not even XI was this bad at release. I at least had fun with vanilla XI. When I bought XIV I was thoroughly disappointed. I felt like I just paid $50 to continue playing the beta.

Overall, I just think SE rushed the hell out of XIV. If they took an extra 6 months of development and actually listened to feedback, we might not be having this problem.


As far as player numbers go...
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but after Guild Wars 2 and the new Star Wars MMO comes out FFXIV doesn't stand a chance. I think FFXIV's numbers will continue to bomb unless they really pull something amazing off or they keep the game free to play forever (in which case I'd be more than happy to keep playing it).