I wouldn't mind FFXIV becoming a WoW clone in the casual/hardcore appeal if...

[fusional]

Your an Idiot. ... They never said "Oh yeah, we're gonna take all of WoW's Subscribes, that's for sure!"

Trion Worlds' David Reid has previously suggested that Rift is the reason for World of Warcraft's dip in subscribers after saying "It was a pleasure to see that in the latest Activision Blizzard earnings call, they inquired about Rift when Blizzard announced that their subscriber numbers went from 12 million to 11.4 million. You can do some math... we know very well where those 600,000 people are."

so, let's do some quick math of our own. rift devs saying wow is dying, wow is fading, wow is killing itself... then following up by saying their subs all came from the dying giant (and going on to assume their 600k would not only stay constant- but grow. largely from the same subscriber base. except it didn't. ouch.)

now we'll compare and contrast. can you show me any instance whatsoever of Yoshi and the XIV devs comparing themselves to WoW in a "they're on the downturn, we're gonna take their subs" kind of way? no, you can't. because it hasn't happened. i wonder why that is? instead you only see yoshi talking about WoW as the golden standard of MMOs, and how if XIV is to be successful it needs to do some things right that WoW has also done right, blase blase.

there are no direct comparisons to wow in a competitive manner.

so if XIV fails to top 1 million subs, it won't be seen as a failure in that regard because it never put its foot in its mouth in the first place. (though you could argue xiv has been seen as a failure, and could still be come 2.0, based simply on their low number of subs when weighed against their admittedly large fanbase. great things are expected from FF titles, and if they don't deliver- it's easy to see them as failures)

flail on, kiddo.