Well, from their standpoint a FC should consist of 300 + faceless members with whom you can't possibly interact personally all at the same time instead of being smaller groups of likeminded players. The math works out then and if this is the course the game is taking then I'm out, some other people probaly, too. Now I'm not whining about it, the designer chose to go a certain path, i don't like, I go play something else, nobody cares. That being said, I do doubt this model attracts a lot of people. Pay 200k Gil and have your guildmaster or a small group design an FC house that you have nothing to do with to be able to hang out with people who share the same guildtag as you and nothing else.


The repetitive nature of the game right now also has already turned a lot of people off and I don't see it changing any time soon. The playerbase here right now seems to be general FF fans, former FF 11 players and people who got sick of GW2/Rift/WoW and wanted to try something that looked really good and that reminded them of the vanilla mmo feeling. That passes though, quite quickly, most people will want to see comfort functions very soon, players these days still want to be challenged to accomplish things, but investing time is not considered a challenge - you are just investing time, every idiot can invest time, you're not special, you're not a better player, you don't know anything better, you just play more - that's not hardcore or anything, it's not entertaining and it will make them lose subs.

FF14 is not the first mmo to try this, but you can't bring out a vanilla WoW "clone" or make a game where farming tons of shit is the main content - look at any mmo that came out and triedto do the same thing or simply cater to more hardcore players, be it pve oriented or pvp oriented, they all failed.