Just played Final Fantasy XI

[Talraen]

Official Vanadiel Census
looking at this you can 40% of the player base upto or beyond "emptiness bleeds" with roughly another 30% of the playerbase scattered along at various points before that.

While those figures only represent people who have started those missions and not cleared them it does still show a significant chunk of the playerbase was doing cop. and if you look at "the last verse" almost 25% of players had cleared it entirely.

this census is also the 2009 one so the figures represented are before abyssea came and the leve lcaps were removed. so COP particiapation was actually quite high when you look at it.

note however i'm not saying my numbers are 100% accurate because SE simply isn't as open with information as it once was for one reason or another.

I think this data actually proves my point. This data is from 2008 and 2009, and Chains of Promathia came out in 2004. There are already two subsequent expansions out by this point. So, four years after release, what looks to be just under 50% of players have completed the first three Promyvions. It's true that many players who got past that point go all the way, but that's just how FFXI works: you either had a static and did everything, or you didn't and you could barely progress at all. (Just look at the bar graphs; most of the graphs in the middle are virtually unchanged, but about as many players as got past the first mission in 2009 finished all of them.)

With the caveat that I don't think these numbers are actually accurate, but they're all that we have, let's compare to how the FFXIV census works. Again, "active player" means someone who finished the level 65 dungeon. That's halfway through the latest expansion. Around 25%, generously, of players are halfway through WotG according to this data. But WotG is really new, so let's look at ToAU instead - there, it's maybe 40% in 2009 and closer to 30% in 2008. Even CoP in 2009 is basically 50/50 for who's at least halfway through. By the FFXIV metric of "active players" those would reduce FFXI's 500k to 125k, 200k, or 250k, respectively. All of which are well below the 525k listed on the FFXIV census. FFXIV is still clearly the more popular game by a wide margin.

You may be taking your own experiences to be representative of other servers just like you're telling Dzian not to. At least if I'm reading what you typed right. Nobody with any amount of playtime will say XI was all good or all bad or that the community was made of altruistic angels. On Siren it was common to see CoP clear parties and statics (I went through about 3 of them myself for others). XIV is more broadly appealing which is where I feel like it threw out the baby with the bathwater in the transition from 1.0. So many good systems thrown away for streamlining. Which is FINE, they needed a solid base to build up from but it often feels like they don't want to build up at all in terms of complexity or difficulty.

Wasn't it only recently that XIV's profits finally surpassed XI's? That's actually quite a feat considering how much of a head start the prior game had. So obviously they know what they're doing to encourage sales and after-purchase profits. No one can deny that XIV appeals to a broader demographic because the two games were vastly different. I myself would just be happy if they took some systems from XI or 1.0 and updated them for XIV's ecosystem.

To clarify, I'm not saying that my experience is the norm or even that common in FFXI. What I am pointing out is that nostalgia threads like this are usually populated only by people who played and loved FFXI, and ignores the experiences of the many, many people who did not have that experience. I'm saying that our experiences both exist. And that's the flaw with FFXI, and the reason they didn't make FFXIV like it.

The problem with taking FFXI's systems and updating them for FFXIV is that some of those systems are inherent to the reason FFXI had more limited appeal than FFXIV. For instance, open-world bosses. Look at how much trouble Hunts cause, and just imagine that combined with week-long spawns and maybe an FFXI-style claim system. Hunts are the updated version of open world bosses, yet people still constantly clamor for them. But hey, if it makes you feel better, the upcoming chocobo saddlebags are a very FFXI-style inventory expansion.