Curious state of raiding and could something from the early days of XI fix it?

[Dzian]

This argument gets thrown around all the time in discussions like this, but I've never seen any evidence produced for it that goes beyond anecdotal.

Even reading these forums you can see many people say the rewards just aren't worth it. and across the industry as a whole there have been numerous studies into gamers and there habits not all of directly related to mmos but still there's a wealth of evidence out there.

Speaking of which. Do you have any source for that claim or any actual numbers to back it up?

9th Vanadiel Census

Here ya go. this is from 2009 so Before Abyssea. take a look and you can see that 40% of the player base had progressed through COP and reached chapter 8 "Emptiness Bleeds". despite it being notoriously difficult content. what you can also see is that 25% of players had cleared COP entirely and had unlocked "The Last Verse"

So 40% of the playerbase was taking on the hardest content in the game. (more if you count those making progress but not upto chapter 8 at the time) lets look at xiv where what percentage of the playerbase is even attempting the hardest content in the game? If I recall the raiding population in xiv equates to 3-4%
That is a very significant difference and it shows that difficulty is not the deciding factor in whether or not players take on challenges.

Players love challenges but they need to be worthwhile. the rewards need to justify the challenge, and in modern mmos that just doesn't happen which is why the endgame populations are so small. in many cases being difficult isn't what turns players away. the lack of incentive or reward is.

if the rewards were worthwhile and actually valuable. you might find 40% of the playerbase tackling savage instead of 4%