Sucks that the pouplation is thining!

[Xatsh]

I assume you never played the initial release of FFXI in '02. You probably picked it up after its release in NA ('04) or EU ('05), in which case it was already 2 years old and had one full expansion (NA, Zilart) or two (EU, CoP), so what you expected in FFXIV was based on a totally wrong view of what FFXI was at this stage of its life and many, mnay months afterwards.

There is a difference.

XI took 8-12 months (more for the casuals) to do everything at launch due the content design.

XIV takes 1-2 months.

IF you are going to have a game focused on casual content you need a whole lot more of it.

[Naelle]

Welcome to the MMO genre where population always dwindles between patches and the points don't ma- Nevermind.

[HaiHai]

I was playing for like 6 hours a day for the first 2-3 weeks or so after launch. Now I play for maybe 6 hours a week maximum.

Log on. Clear binding coil. Do a few dungeon runs to finish cap. Never log back on for the rest of the week. I'm sure I can't be the only one in this situation.

The game just doesn't provide enough content to keep players logging in every day once they reach the "gear threshhold". That point when you no longer need to farm philo for gear, and are literally only waiting for coil drops, and weekly myth cap.

[TaiSixx]

I am on the Behemoth server and it really depends on the time of day and area. I see players on my screen all the time unless I am traveling. Even then I see all fates basically filled up from lv1-50. Doesn't take me long to Que. I think the longest I have ever had to wait was close to 22 mins or something like that. It was early morning on a week day as well.

[Hyrist]

I am starting to see the population thin out and it sure sucks. I thought for sure the servers would be packed like FFXI for years. Guess I was wrong!

Greg

*eye roll*

Go out to the Lightning Event, there's your missing population.

There is a difference.

XI took 8-12 months (more for the casuals) to do everything at launch due the content design.

XIV takes 1-2 months.

IF you are going to have a game focused on casual content you need a whole lot more of it.

... wha?

Vanilla XI took 1-2 months to reach 50. The end Boss was Shadowlord, and the only thing mildly resembling endgame was Expeditionary force...

[Dyvid]

Reason for people not logging in as often:
1) We are gamers. PS4 just launched as well as COD, BF4, and so on. Xbox One comes out next week.
2) New patch is on the horizon. Believe it or not some people play less right before a huge update. I personally don't want to level another job until after 2.1 for dungeon runs.
3) Titan HM. Like it or not this is a huge problem for a lot of people and might want to look at some adjustment after 2.1 comes out. Not so much a nerf as an time adjustment, say add 1 or 2 sec to red zone.

[Reslin]

There is still a decent amount of people on my server. But there are less people on this week then last week. When I first started this game is was wall to wall people. And now depending on the time of the day its hard to get a fate group. I know we are going to lose even more people at the 90 day mark and that really sucks. I wish this game was like FFXI, my server was wall to wall people for 4 years straight!

Leveling is very easy most people are level 50 at this point and have the classes they want at level 50. It doesn't mean the population is less.

[Tupsi]

I'm still getting "world is full" and need to wait to login.

You're on a legacy world - People can go to it (and many had no choice if they wanted to join friends) but you can't off of it, it's well known that Legacy worlds are packed for that very reason alone..

[Doo]

You're on a legacy world - People can go to it (and many had no choice if they wanted to join friends) but you can't off of it, it's well known that Legacy worlds are packed for that very reason alone..

That and also the Legacy members are subs4lyfe since they were still playing when the game was doodoo.

[verily]

I am starting to see the population thin out and it sure sucks. I thought for sure the servers would be packed like FFXI for years. Guess I was wrong!

Greg

Relax on the sensationalism and the FFXI nostalgia bias.

You're using 2 months of a new game as a basis for comparison to a game that's been around for a decade? How can you jump to such baseless conclusions? Are you psychic? Did you predict the slow but inevitable collapse of FFXI's population as well? Can you link me to the threads you made about that?

Do you have any idea how silly it makes you look to essentially proclaim the game is dying or dead?

Let's talk facts.

FFXI maintained about 500k subs over a five year period ('04-'09), sure, but then the population began to take a nosedive in 2010 and SE hasn't released actual numbers since. If you log into FFXI today and do some world searches during NA/EU/JP peak times, even on the most populated servers the results are pretty depressing- even moreso when you consider how many of those results are singular players who are multiboxing additional characters.

FFXIV:ARR is less than 3 months old. In spite of that, it has already topped FFXI's peak subscriber mark of ~550k. It took FFXI about 2 years from launch to reach that number. MMO populations will always fluctuate, especially in the early stages when the game is still building a foundation of content. FFXI was no different- but you probably wouldn't know that if you came into the game sometime around the peak. I happened to start playing at japanese release in 2002, and once people started hitting level 50 (the level cap before NA release) there was nothing to do except start grinding other jobs until boredom overtook you and you stopped logging on.

Literally nothing to do. There was only level grinding and crafting.

Most successful MMO populations will grow greatly after the first expansion, and don't truly stabilize until sometime around the second expansion. This was very apparent with FFXI to anyone who actually started at the beginning. If you came in between '05 and '08 though, you wouldn't have ever seen that and just assumed it had always been that stable. CoP was an excellent expansion and it really kept people in the game. For those who played WoW since the beginning, they would have seen similar population trends with Vanilla/TBC/WotLK.

Many of the people unsubbing from FFXIV:ARR now will resub in 2.1, then unsub again, then resub for 2.2, etc. This was a common occurrence in FFXI as well. People very often unsubbed between expansions and major content patches, except it was even more pronounced since content patches were so spaced out. As a result, it wasn't uncommon to go 6-8+ months at a time without seeing some of your friends come back to Vanadiel.

There are things in ARR that aren't perfect and need improved upon, absolutely. But these doomsayer threads about how the game is dying/dead/done for have been happening since alpha and people keep saying exactly the same things. The threads were proven wrong before, and there's a good chance they'll be proven wrong again- assuming Yoshi and crew can continue to deliver worthwhile content in a timely manner while fixing/improving the important little nagging things that are driving some players away from the game.

You loved FFXI, we get it- but settle down on the hyperbole. The more you repeat yourselves the more it looks like you're simply trying to convince yourselves rather than the rest of us. And that being the case, you should ask yourself what it is you need to convince yourself of in the first place, and why. And what do you gain from regurgitating the same tired rhetoric over and over?

The FFXI community is already largely looked upon with stigma from the rest of the community, and if anything you're just making the FFXI community look worse with these threads. FFXI was a great game for its time, but its time is over. Stop the madness, and stop dragging its name through the mud. Enjoy FFXIV:ARR for what it is, or don't- but the harder you try to find excuses for baseless comparisons to FFXI the more of a wedge you drive between that community and this one.

And people wonder why ARR's community feels so toxic.