My first 72 hours since being gone for two years...:(

[MicahZerrshia]

Now compare these ancient population numbers when XI was at its peak to today's big players. Even ignoring WoW and just using the other top dogs it's blatantly clear that XI only ever had a small token population. Using other small MMOs for comparison doesn't change that. The OP is claiming XI is some absurdly popular MMO and apparently has a steady population putting XIV to shame, that is blatantly false. It never even surpassed 1 million subscriptions. It was always niche and now is even more niche.

It doesn't matter about actual numbers which were not nearly as small as you imply, the player base is more dedicated than almost any other mmo. If you actually were around in the ToAU days you would have seen just how busy the game was. It was never laughably low in population until around the Abyssea release, when they undid all the hard work ppl have put in (my conspiracy theory was they did this to rush ppl thru XI and usher them into XIV, but then 1.0 happened) causing a lot of players to rage quit. It never hit 20 million players like WoW but it def wasn't hurting for players by any means. In fact RotZ was supposed to be the end of the game but it was so popular they released 5 more expansions and 3 mini dlc and the VR mini story. SE wouldn't have done that if the population was laughably small. You say you are not hating on FFXI and that ppl are huffing copium, but either your memory is flawed or you are just one of the many who want to cry about how bad XI was/is but never actually played long enough to understand it or even touched it at all. Hating on XI seems to be sport for a lot of XIV players who have never touched it but claim to be vets for some reason. The FFXIV team would likely love to have players as dedicated as XI's who actually play the game instead of standing in towns or at clubs showing off their mods.

And XI is in the midst of a resurgence currently, even having to lock servers due to such high numbers, something it never did even at it's peak. Fujito also just announced a bunch of plans and features they are currently working on for the future of the game and they are all absolutely fantastic and seems to be drawing even more ppl back to the game. I wouldn't be surprised of the XI and XIV population numbers are starting to even out with XIV having it's own Abyssea moment in the form of DT. The FFXI devs are just as dedicated and love that game, which is something XIV is lacking.