FFXIV better stop doing what WoW's doing, because its losing millions of subs.

[Vickii]

I don't think you can blame WoW's subscription loss solely on gated content. I fell away from the game a long time ago, but my friends who still played did so mainly out of habit/addiction. That game peaked a long time ago now, and players grow up, get lives. Plus their development team changed massively and the new content hasn't been as fun/epic. There's a lot of reasons why it's losing subs, mostly because it's like an 11 year old game.

[Welsper59]

Why is it that these threads tend to have no one (or very few) mention the fact that the game is old? Many of the players who were part of the 10mil+ sub phase almost a decade ago (longer than that if you were there since early vanilla) have either grown up to get jobs or moved on to other priorities/games. That perhaps the times have changed and hobbies are much more robust in availability or execution. These threads always attract people who like to point out flaws that the game they play now has (i.e. FFXIV) and relate them to some omen about how this one and only reason will be why it will fail soon. It clearly has nothing to do with the fickle nature of the human mind, selection of alternative sources of entertainment, nor with other meaningless "priorities" that come with getting older.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

Hasn't WoW become more casual friendly in the years? I seriously doubt it bled subs due to "lack of time" for its players, otherwise FF14 would have been bled dry ages ago. As everyone else already pointed out, WoW was just too slow to push out new stuff and what happens when nothing gets updated? People stop caring and find something else to do.

The point i was making is it has become TOO casual friendly, to the point you just blast to level 100, do LFR a few times for gear, and you've experienced pretty much the whole expansion. There's no incentive to do dungeons, raids, or anything really because everything you need you can get from LFR. This is very similar to FFXIV, but the only difference is Yoshida was smart enough to make esoterics better than the alex normal gear, so people will stick around a bit longer to try and get the eso gear.

EDIT: FFXIV haven't shot themselves in the foot quite yet, but they are dangerously close to doing the exact same thing that is costing blizzard 5M subscriber dollars, at 15 bux a month thats a ton of money. Devs can only make content so fast.

[Bishop81]

Also a WoW refugee.

Left because,

• Story was fanfiction bad. [1]
• Nothing interesting to do outside raiding other than play a mobile game in Garrisons - nothing wrong with that but it get's old real quick. [2]

That's the TL;DR version anyway.

[1] WoW's lore is so broken it isn't funny. World building is dead as a door nail. Atmosphere is non-existence thanks to that. "World of Warcraft"? More like "Theme park of Warcraft".

[2] FFXIV seems to be going the same route unfortunately. Hunts and Treasure Maps are nice as is gathering. But that's it. All the effort goings into making raids that only 5% will really experience "as intended" while the rest of us "peasants" get "mind-numbing chores" disguised as content.

The point i was making is it has become TOO casual friendly, to the point you just blast to level 100, do LFR a few times for gear, and you've experienced pretty much the whole expansion. There's no incentive to do dungeons, raids, or anything really because everything you need you can get from LFR. This is very similar to FFXIV, but the only difference is Yoshida was smart enough to make esoterics better than the alex normal gear, so people will stick around a bit longer to try and get the eso gear.

Oh please. Hardcore raiding has never been better. Dropped to 5.6 million subs anyway.

Wake up. It's the "casuals" that are leaving.

[Duelle]

Funny, that didn't even come up in the list of reasons the friends of mine who left WoW for FFXIV gave.

What I've heard was:
- the story/lore is an utter mess and relies too much on things like tie-in novels
- the pace and amount of content updates is incredibly inconsistent (they had one update that was nothing but Twitter integration and a selfie cam)
- getting groups for raid could be a nightmare
- the terrain was terrible to navigate and they took away flying to make it even worse
- they hated the direction the story took after Mists of Pandaria
- the game stopped feeling like Warcraft a long time ago

Gating and caps didn't even come up in the conversation.

Add to that list:

- They promised things and didn't deliver.

They've made mistakes, but it's idiotic to try to narrow it down to something like content gating. It's simply a case of one thing leads to another.

They started changing things for the sake of change (eyes BRD) with Cataclysm and pissed off a bunch of people. That was a combination of PvP being broken despite them still balancing the game around it along with content tuning that was on a different planet from how it was tuned in WotLK. That certain specs made off better than others didn't help. Not even going into how bad Cataclysm's story was (zone storylines were disjointed and some set up story threads they never followed up on).

Mists of Pandaria didn't do much since they decided to have daily quests everywhere and used a setting that wasn't received well by people who weren't around in vanilla asking for Pandaren to be implemented as a playable race (yes, the whole "lulz ur ripping off kung fu panda"). They poured a ton of money into MoP only for it to flounder about; the asset quality in MoP even now is still superior to what was seen in other expansions. From a writing perspective Pandaria had a lot of stuff that sounded "made up". Not even cohesive to the rest of Azeroth. Then came the gutting of specs and the ridiculous conclusion to the story. This was also the expansion that killed warrior tanking for me, since the devs fell in love with Death Knight's active mitigation mechanics and decided to copy-paste it on to the other tanks.

Warlords of Draenor relied on hype because it was supposed to be a return to a more familiar setting. Problem is they decided to recycle old characters in what is a blatant admission that they can't come up with any new characters. Best leveling experience to date, but then you run out of quests and find yourself doing daily chores in your Garrison. They removed flight to prevent people from seeing how small some zones were (and giving some bullshit excuse that introducing flight was a mistake). The only good thing out of the expansion was that they improved Ret paladins so that they stopped being holy rogues. Everything else was either a wash or a downgrade. That's not even counting that they promised The Temple of Karabor and Bladespire Citadel were going to be the faction bases for the Alliance and Horde then made up some excuse to cut those out.

For a relatable point, this would be as if Yoshida had gone on about Ishgard in Heavensward then a month before launch said that Ishgard as a player hub "didn't fit" and that you'll only get to have cutscenes in there without actual access to the city. Can you imagine the riot that would have broken out over that?

[Gunspec]

Hasn't WoW become more casual friendly in the years? I seriously doubt it bled subs due to "lack of time" for its players, otherwise FF14 would have been bled dry ages ago. As everyone else already pointed out, WoW was just too slow to push out new stuff and what happens when nothing gets updated? People stop caring and find something else to do.

Really, it's the developers who stopped caring first. Reading their statements to the fans in the last few years, there has been a lack of interest in the world, a lack of interest in making new dungeons and zones, a lack of interest in continuing storylines that were left hanging only a year or two earlier, and a lack of updating anything that can simply be ignored instead. Why add a feature you mentioned earlier when you can ignore it? Why expand on a storyline that requires new art assets, when you can make an expansion that reuses as much old material as possible?

That apathy has always existed in WoW, for example the faction leaders had generic character models for years that didn't fit their artwork properly. Why update a character model when you can just ignore them instead? They started applying a bit more care to that area during the Cataclysm expansion, redesigning large amounts of the early game content and characters, but it came during a decline in endgame content that bled subscribers for the first time. Since then, cost and return has been the chief consideration for most of the dev team.

We've seen that in FFXIV with the "personal housing" debacle, but at least THAT is a cost/ return issue that makes more sense. Instanced housing requires more server capacity, which requires clearance from SE higher-ups.

When the FFXIV devs start saying "we'd like to do more with Doma, but we just don't see that happening because we would have to make too many assets, let's just have a story were we allude to the eastern continent sinking", then we should worry.

[CarnivalNights]

Red Scrip gating is easily the worst design I've ever seen in any MMO ever. I've never played an MMO with this crafting and gathering design and by that same token, I've never seen an MMO gate crafters and gatherers this hard and in this fashion, ever.

[Asierid]

Clearly it has nothing to do with the fact that they take forever to release any form of content. The year or so that we spent doing SoO, then playing Farmville with your garrison (because gathering and crafting was gutted) with raids that were "meh" at best even at the hardest levels kind of gets old after a bit with little to no change in strategy other than the boss hitting harder.

What little story is left is usually locked behind raids, so now you get to sit and auto attack your way to victory in raid finder while dbm yells at you for standing in fire that won't kill you anyway.

They dug this hole themselves.

[jomoru]

Snip

Counter Point. Wildstar. It was all about driving the casuals away and look how quickly its crashed and burned

[Asierid]

..

You have to cater to both. XIV has its savage mode for those kinds of raiders, and normal for those that are not. It has instant gratification in gear for those that complete it, and steady income in the form of tomes for those that are not. Even crafting is now this way.

You can't make it one sided, a la Wildatar. WoWs problem was the lack of content in general. Sure it was casual, but you also had challenge modes, Mythic raids, Arena, etc. for those that wanted to push themselves.

Problem is that they release this content then don't touch it for a year. We get updates every 3-4 months. We didn't see anything in wow for nearly 3/4 to a full year. Even then it was downed in the first two days. The rate of development sucked as well as the quality of the product.

That's why they are failing. They keep promising on content, then falling back and saying they can't deliver while giving us a quarter of what was said.