Quote Originally Posted by Ryel View Post
There's a major flaw in trying to compare subscription losses between WoW and FFXIV, while XIV certainly isnt going to drop half it's player-base over a patch or two it also did not have the nearly 10 year period of growth and success that WoW has had.

As much as many players loved WoW over the years the reality is that they very well can afford to lose massive numbers of players over the course of time (though as a business blizzard certainly doesn't want to) as by MMO standards the game is getting on in years and Blizzard is working on other projects.
Blizzard did not lose subscribers because it is 10 years old. The reason that Blizzard is losing subscribers, losing 5 million subscribers in only 3 months into Warlords of Draenor and driving blizzard to release a game time token you can buy from other players for gold to stabilize the bleeding, was a massive drop in the quality of the content they put out and the long droughts between content releases. After making the game raid or die and swinging between extremes with knee jerk reactionary expansions. As well as a shift towards trying to shove out an expansion every year, which leads to them heavily cutting promised content from the expansion to get it out faster, in addition to them heavily simplifying the game because they sell character boosts with every expansion.

In WoW either you raid... or you wait till the next expac for more dungeon/world content. Which is going to be 14-18 months away.

Despite the fact that Blizzards WoW team is considerably larger then SE's FFXIV team it takes them considerably longer to make content.