Why "Super Savage" is a good thing...

[Malzian]

I also believe (my personal opinion, don't jump at me for voicing it) that the raiders are a big part of keeping the game alive.
Between patches, when most casuals have finished all they're interested in and suspend their sub til next patch, and I know a lot of people who do just that, it's the raid groups that still log in. They will still run dungeons to cap tomes, to get gear for other jobs to maybe play in raid one day (granted not all do, but I do just that), they will log in to get their weekly clears, they will work on maybe getting that one elusive item dropped and they will fight for their clears til the last minute before servers go down for next patch. And they continue to pay their sub.
So I say, it's nice of SE to finally show their raiders some love. People keep saying it's just 1% of the playerbase, but it's that 1% who keeps their subs up continually in order to raid, while many other players are already off somewhere else waiting for new content.

Umm... I'm not sure about your experience but from what I've seen its generally the "casuals" who stay subbed and the hardcore raiders that don't. Fact is that if you're doing content casually it lasts longer so there's more reason to log in and do things for longer periods of time since you still have things to do. Do the raiders still log in? Yes, but they tend to log in and grab the top BiS that they can, but then they generally leave until some new BiS or another raid comes along.

Some of that 1% may keep their subs up but I don't think that it's because they're continuing to raid as much as it is just matter of habit. Most of them have milked the Savage raids dry within 7 weeks of the first full clear, but honestly the major bulk of consistent subs the game has stems from people playing casually because, even after the raids have been out and cleared for weeks... they still have fresh content to do.

[AngeloFlick]

Why? Because this kind of content is what gives an MMO "street cred", as it were. World of Warcraft has professional guilds with corporate sponsors who race to be the world first in clearing raids (and individual raid bosses, too) and this spectacle very much becomes an event unto itself that garners yet more interest in the game.

It also helps when players compare the two MMOs and trying to determine which they want to play: even if the player in question will never ACTUALLY enter Super Savage, they'll know for a fact that they'll never go without challenge in the game, and that's more important than you'd think.

As someone who has been playing various MMOs since the days of Everquest and did the whole hardcore raiding thing for at least a decade-
I don't actually give a crap about this game's "cred" in comparison to WoW. I played it from beta all the way through WotLK before quitting because I have come to deeply dislike the viewpoint that hardcore endgame in MMOs is everything, because you know what? Once you quit the game it all becomes worthless very quickly. No one gives a crap anymore that we cleared Vex Thal in 2 days due to late notification in EQ1 (open world raiding rotations yo), or that our guild did weekly Molten Core clears in vanilla WoW. All that stuff is rotting on my old characters and all the stress and drama I dealt with to get it was not worth it in the end. At all. I *like* the overall feel of FFXIV, I love the requirement of MSQ and the fact that Squeenix tries to keep all the old content relevant and focuses on casuals. As far as I've been able to tell, FFXIV is the only MMO that does those things instead of catering to the hardcore crowd and for me, that's the draw. Trying to compete with WoW by doing the endgame things WoW does just makes for another cookie cutter WoW clone. And if I wanted that, I'd go dig out my Blizzard authenticator.

Umm... I'm not sure about your experience but from what I've seen its generally the "casuals" who stay subbed and the hardcore raiders that don't. Fact is that if you're doing content casually it lasts longer so there's more reason to log in and do things for longer periods of time since you still have things to do. Do the raiders still log in? Yes, but they tend to log in and grab the top BiS that they can, but then they generally leave until some new BiS or another raid comes along.

Some of that 1% may keep their subs up but I don't think that it's because they're continuing to raid as much as it is just matter of habit. Most of them have milked the Savage raids dry within 7 weeks of the first full clear, but honestly the major bulk of consistent subs the game has stems from people playing casually because, even after the raids have been out and cleared for weeks... they still have fresh content to do.

Pretty much this. I've never unsubbed since I started and I've been happily leveling alt classes, gathering, questing, and working on older content that I passed over at level due to my current casual playstyle. Logging in just to run the weeklies gets old really quick, and IMO if all you do is raid in FFXIV you're not even enjoying the stuff that sets this game apart from WoW and all the other cookie cutter MMOs.