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

[Bishop81]

...
So a game has an initial spike in popularity, plateaus, and then nose-dives. WoW plateaued in 2007. WoW is actually nearing the "nosedive off a cliff" point because they aren't releasing expansion content fast enough to hold the plateau up. Or in other words the content is now so easy that nobody has any reason to subscribe longer than it takes to complete the content.

Here is a more updated one,



It's in the decline phrase of its product life cycle. If you ignore the short-lived spikes, it's a gradual decline after 2011.

Attempts at a life extension have so far failed - given their deafness to feedback and cost cutting, that isn't surprising.

[GabrielK]

Here is a more updated one,



It's in the decline phrase of its product life cycle. If you ignore the short-lived spikes, it's a gradual decline after 2010.

Attempts at a life extension have so far failed - given their deafness to feedback and cost cutting, that isn't surprising.

There's no decrease until 2011.
There's nothing short lived about the increase to 11-12 million during WOTLK, it kept it steady for nearly 2 years.
The decline began after WOTLK, after the start of Cataclysm.

[Bishop81]

There's no decrease until 2011.
There's nothing short lived about the increase to 11-12 million during WOTLK, it kept it steady for nearly 2 years.
The decline began after WOTLK, after the start of Cataclysm.

2010 is a typo on my part.

I'm talking about the spikes when a new expansion/patch goes live. Those are short-lived.

[adn]

It's not really fair to compare any MMO to WoW because WoW is kind of an exception to all of the rules that normally apply to MMOs. There will probably never be another MMO as successful as WoW (until VR technology is much more advanced) and so trying to apply the same paradigms to other MMOs falls a bit short because WoW has a lot of peculiarities about it due to its massive success.

For example, in the period between the end of MoP and WoD, they added no content at all for an entire year and still maintained a sizeable subscriber base. No other MMO could do this and survive with a 7mil+ sub base. (The argument can be made that their poor choices since the end of MoP are now catching up to them, however.)

I don't think FFXIV is falling into the trap that WoW has, and moreover I think the developers of FFXIV are very humble. What has been turning people off from WoW a lot lately is developer arrogance.

[Vlady]

I am surprised no one has talked about the massive ban waves in wow right now and FF 14 lax cheating stances. Over 800k players have received temp or perma bans on wow over 3 ban waves.

[adn]

I am surprised no one has talked about the massive ban waves in wow right now and FF 14 lax cheating stances. Over 800k players have received temp or perma bans on wow over 3 ban waves.

This is because the HonorBuddy bot was a massive problem in WoW PVP. You could enter battlegrounds that were entirely full of people botting for honor, and this went on for months. The only recent example of botting in FFXIV that I can remember is people botting FATEs in N. Thanalan, and that's nowhere near on the scale of the bot problem that WoW had in BGs.

[Blood-Aki]

This is because the HonorBuddy bot was a massive problem in WoW PVP. You could enter battlegrounds that were entirely full of people botting for honor, and this went on for months. The only recent example of botting in FFXIV that I can remember is people botting FATEs in N. Thanalan, and that's nowhere near on the scale of the bot problem that WoW had in BGs.

Actually the bot problem in FFXIV is pretty bad, the thing is, you don't see them, RMT work by spamming dungeons for gill, this is like 8+ at a time, in multiple groups, on all servers, this isn't even including all the harvest/mining bots, which is why you can go to the MB and see very large quantities of crystals/shards on sale. that no human would be able to get quickly doing manually. (unless they never sleep) or i would love to know someone who legit farmed 3000 crystals in a week.

They may not directly affect your gameplay. Which is why they go unnoticed/unreported (or slow to be dealt with)

[Adire]

Looks like my previous MMO(The Secret World) may be in for some trouble too now. Funcom's launch of Lego Minifigures Online was disastrous and they're now predicting debts to come due in June 2016 without the money to pay them. The company is looking to sell, merge, or restructure. Why they thought it would be a good idea to launch something as unattractive to the average PC gamer as a LEGO game when the MMO and LEGO game markets are both saturated, who knows. They were better off focusing on TSW or Anarchy Online since they bring in the biggest profits IIRC.

Hope the game doesn't die, go into shambles, or even worse, get sold to a Korean F2P cash shop grindfest company. It's niche and a lot of its players refuse to leave :/ but if it does die or get turned into a mess, I'm sure FFXIV will see a few of its former players.

Bad time to be most MMOs.

[Happosai]

So... what exactly are you suggesting? They remove the weekly lockouts? No caps on tomes/scripts so that people can grind everything in a matter of days/weeks? As many have pointed out elsewhere and probably here (20 pages... not reading em) this is a terrible business model and we would be losing far more subs.

Are you suggesting an alternate system? I personally cant think of a better one but I have played a worse one. I came to ffxiv from diablo 3. The diablo franchise will always hold a special place in my heart but I will never play one ever again. The amount of rng in diablo 3 (particularly at release) was terrible. But thats how THEY kept you playing. You could invest years into that game and never see that one item you were looking for. It got to the point where the most efficient way to play the game was to not play it at all. Your time was better spent sniping items on the market board, flipping, and buying all the gg items with your massive pile of gold.

[Nadirah]

To be quite fair, every product has a shelf life. Even greats that were staples for decades drop off eventually.

To expect an MMO to go on forever with a super huge population is just... bad.