Quote Originally Posted by Murugan View Post
I'm sorry your life is so hard. How do you manage to do all of those things which all human beings have done for thousands of years and still have a hobby?!

I am also sorry that you apparently wasted your youth playing an MMO nonstop and missing out on everything else life has to offer and are now bitter.

If you want to just "tune out" maybe you should try becoming addicted to drugs. Why demand massive game worlds be developed and then emptied of all substance just so you have an effortless "escape" from your wonderful terrible life.
The person you quoted made a valid point so you turn to vague personal insults? Always a good way to win folks over.

From the onset, XIV was intended to be a game for an audience more broad than XI.

With that in mind, SE sunk a lot of dough into development.

Look at Demon's Souls as a good example. It was designed to be a hardcore game. It's punishing, brutal and as boring as XI was after a while. But it was designed to make a profit off the kind of low sales you get from a small niche marke. When it finally hit 500k units sold well after its release, Altus was elated with the "success." But it was a hardcore game designed to profit off the kind of sales that sort of game can generate.

XIV was made to pull in a casual audience -- albeit it was rushed out the door before it was fully designed. So the original "casuals and hardcores living in harmony" concept never came to be. But just because the hardcore audience is mainly the one that currently is playing doesn't change the amount of money and man hours they've already sunk into making the game.

They need to sell more units. And to do that they need to give people a reason to invest enough time each month to keep paying.

People have netflix (qwikster). Console games with in-depth multiplayer. High level characters in other mmos. And, as AmyRae mentioned, the general activities of day to day life. SE needs to give these people a reason to spend time in Eorzea, and a brutal unrewarding time sink just won't cut it.

SE could have designed a game for what's left of a hardcore generation. But they didn't. And nothing is going to change that fact. Now they need to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make if they ever expect to even break even on this game.