Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
Unfortunately, I think you'll find that in the long run it's far from a majority of players that want something more like FFXI's structure. There's not, to my knowledge, any horizontal progression game that has a subscriber base as large as this one's (with perhaps roughly 700k actively playing subscribers and more that are subscribed) and definitely none with a population anywhere approaching WoW's. From what I recall, FFXI peaked at somewhere between 500k and 750k subscribers, but how many of those were actually active is anyone's guess. FFXIV is a much younger game with more subscriptions than that, at least judging by what data's available to us, as is WoW, and part of what makes that possible is that the "vertical treadmill" is better at encouraging players to continue subscribing.
There are few sub games out there, but Guild Wars 2 would be a game that reaches numbers comparable (or exceeding) FFXIV and focuses on Horizontal Progression.

Guild Wars 2 is consistently the top most popular game (on hit count and votes) on mmorpg.com. I know this doesn't really speak to the whole community, but that is something.

Both FFXIV and GW2 suffer from only releasing the total accounts created type of numbers (rather than active players). GW has reached over 7 million prior to it's expansion, where FFXIV was nearer 5. Both are estimated to be between 400-800k active players i think.

Another thing that points to GW2 having a higher active playerbase is the reddit subscribers (128k for GW2 vs 85k for FFXIV).