Quote Originally Posted by RichardButte View Post

How many subs have they outright LOST because of the MSQ? Thousands? Tens of thousands? ...Hundreds of thousands? I would never have suspected this to be the case, but the sheer number of people who have unsuccessfully attempted to recruit friends in this thread alone suggests that this might be a very big number.
The answer is Zero. It is NOT the game for them. You don't sacrifice one part of your subscriber base just to appeal to a subscriber base you don't have. This is why all the WoW-clones are awful, because they are trying to offer a WoW experience in a game that doesn't have the WoW lore, and doesn't have the WoW subscription model.

You don't win the market leader with a carbon copy of the last market leader. The sheer number of failed freemium WoW-clones tells me enough that you don't produce a game to appeal to WoW fans if you aren't WoW.

Make your own game, and people want to play your game, will play your game.

MMORPG's are not flavors of soda with fierce brand loyalty. There are plenty of people who are generally neutral on the brand, but have their preference for "Dr.Pepper" or "Root Beer" when handed dozens of choices. You can't come into the market with "Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr.Pepper" and expect everyone who drinks Cherry Coke or Dr.Pepper to like it and replace their favorite with it. Many people will try it once, find they don't like the taste, and that's the end of it. You can't reformulate something once someone gets a bad taste, because they will remember that bad taste. Likewise you can't reformulate the existing product (see Coke II) and not have the loyal fanbase go hostile. Which is what you're seeing in this thread at even the suggestion of nerfing the storyline.

And this is the thing about FFXIV, is that there is a free trial, if the free trial doesn't make you want to subscribe, you haven't lost anything. Square Enix hasn't lost anything either.

WoW has a boost to level 90 that basically lets you skip everything in the game to the most recent content. That IMO is an admission that playing the old content never mattered.

Customer churn (people who leave) is often calculated by Revenue per customer. Hence a Free-Trial player, unless they contact customer support costs them nothing. Solving RMT has a bigger effect than any perceived losses by free-trial players not converting. Players will more readily leave from the constant harassment by RMT first, before they will leave because the storyline seems too tedious.