FFXI lasted for a solid 9 years (abyssea launch) until it started to really lose most of its base (WoW took a sizeable bite out of it but it still maintained a steady 500k subs while other MMOs came and went, barely lasting a year or 2)

The current market be damned, all it shows is it's a volatile, fickle group of people who either don't know what they want or got burned by the failings of traditional MMOs. This is why I still love XI and feel like it was a model that just needed improving, not discarding. Can check my other threads for more detailed posts as I'm not about to rehash the pages and pages of examples I've given, but suffice to say if it ain't broke don't fix i, which is exactly what's happened both post 1.23 XIV and post-abyssea XI;


For all the improvements ARR's made (and it has fixed just about every gripe I had with XI) it's thrown away what made XI such a good, lasting and (IMO) revolutionary game.