You know what would increase subs?

[AlienDiplomat]

This was highly successful for World of Warcraft and Classic servers.

I sadly missed the FFXI era due to being fully entrenched in modding Morrowind and Oblivion at the time. But a lot of what I hear people say about it sounds interesting and with a visual makeover it would definitely be something I would check out if it was included in my FF subscription.

EDIT: Obviously I wouldn't want the devs to devote TOO much time to it, since XIV is my baby and I wouldn't want to further subtract from it's own continued progress. TBH I have kind of been hoping that AI upscale tools like what NVIDIA is doing for lighting and 3D models in addition to textures might streamline these sort of facelifts in the near future. So actual human devs really only need to go over it at a QA level and tweak anything that is horribly wrong in the upscale.

[LyrisAdamanteia]

This was highly successful for World of Warcraft and Classic servers.

I sadly missed the FFXI era due to being fully entrenched in modding Morrowind and Oblivion at the time. But a lot of what I hear people say about it sounds interesting and with a visual makeover it would definitely be something I would check out if it was included in my FF subscription.

EDIT: Obviously I wouldn't want the devs to devote TOO much time to it, since XIV is my baby and I wouldn't want to further subtract from it's own continued progress. TBH I have kind of been hoping that AI upscale tools like what NVIDIA is doing for lighting and 3D models in addition to textures might streamline these sort of facelifts in the near future. So actual human devs really only need to go over it at a QA level and tweak anything that is horribly wrong in the upscale.

The difference being for all WoW fans complaints with it Classic and Retail are essentially the same game. The underlying systems all work pretty similarly in retail 2025 as they did in vanilla 2004, because mmos in the last 21 years haven't changed much, they all pretty much follow WoW's script as it were. FFXIV and FFXI are as different as peanut butter and castor oil in terms of gameplay, as I stated in another comment FFXI is very much an Everquest era mmo with none of the niceties that vanilla WoW would popularize just 2 years after FFXI's release. This is also, largely, why 1.0 ended up a failure. It didn't evolve in key ways, sticking to the formula they created with XI while evolving in others, and even going off the rails in yet others. Hate to be that lady but this is a real "you think you do but you don't" moment. I predict your average XIV fan will spend, maybe, a day max in XI and it would be way too frustrating. There are just a lot of things popularized by WoW (and also concurrently evolved in EQ2 and CoH, released earlier the same year) that are absent from FFXI.

Like people really overestimate the differences between Classic and Retail WoW and underestimate the differences between FFXI and FFXIV. Shoot, an FFXIV server that was structured like Classic WoW (like you take the FFXIV aesthetics and fit it in with the gameplay loop of Classic WoW) in terms of gameplay would be more natural than bringing FFXI up.