Can we end this?

[Tigercub]

I remember seeing a gaming magazine back then who claimed FFXI had reached a 5 million players base. But the issue here is that FFXI does not appeal at all to casuals which are the biggest part of the market. As for the hardcore it is something like 30-40%. The game is focused on you spending 1h looking for a party and then grinding 1 type of monster for maybe days to get 5-10 levels. then move to a new area and repeat. The type of gameplay appeals to very few players.

Which is why nobody is asking for that aspect of FFXI. In place of ideas that failed in FFXIV, some of us want the stuff from FFXI that did appeal to people, enough so that even casuals like myself were drawn to it despite these flaws (exaggerated though they may be). I played FFXI casually for six years, and to be honest most of the people I met in game played casually too.

[TirionCrey]

It is harder to take you seriously when you didn't know FFXI was and is a niche market. It managed to get 5mil players at it's best but that was when it started out and there was barely any competition and it was the only mmo to come out for the very succesful PS2. Once WOW and other mmos came out that number went down very quickly and FFXI never got more then 500k players. It was succesful during it's time only because it didn't have much competition and now it is a game that appeals to very few hardcore gamers which is what a niche is.

Almost NO PC/Console MMOs reach more than 1M players if at all, except for WoW...just because it doesn't reach 10M subscribers like WoW, it's not "niche" or "hardcore".

The most anticipated "WoW killers" didn't even reach 1M...so go figure...

The only MMO that might ride on a wave of success "similiar" to WoW is gonna be Star Wars TOR...and why? Cause it's like the PERFECT WoW clone, with its own franchise that is loved by millions all over the world.

I personally think SW TOR is crap, but it won't change the fact that it will prolly have the most amount of subscribers after WoW.

FFXIV will never reach anywhere close to 1M and SE would be good to realize that and work towards their actual "fanbase" which will be the ones who will support and play this game for years.

[Winterclaw]

The real problem with FFXIV is it's underdeveloped, using a serverside interface that requires quite a lot of Engine and Server tweaks to even fix certain issues and implement certain features and it launched with a lack of content. How are FFXI players the ones at fault? We didn't make this game horrible.

Jenn has a point there.

And if squenix really wanted an FF game for the masses, they would have done a better job if they just cloned WoW. I mean seriously, how hard is it to clone WoW? Play WoW. See what it's like and how you can improve on it. Make your game like WoW. Remember to have good customer service.

I'm not really sure what squenix wanted when they made FF14, but it wasn't a FF11 clone and it wasn't a game that a lot of people would enjoy.

[Onidemon]

Which is why nobody is asking for that aspect of FFXI. In place of ideas that failed in FFXIV, some of us want the stuff from FFXI that did appeal to people, enough so that even casuals like myself were drawn to it despite these flaws (exaggerated though they may be). I played FFXI casually for six years, and to be honest most of the people I met in game played casually too.

I saw a thread this week asking for exactly that. "Plz bring back the grinding camps, we want to spend hours grinding 1 monster and that's all FFXIV needs to be saved" and there was like over 20 likes....

[Onidemon]

Almost NO PC/Console MMOs reach more than 1M players if at all, except for WoW...just because it doesn't reach 10M subscribers like WoW, it's not "niche" or "hardcore".

The most anticipated "WoW killers" didn't even reach 1M...so go figure...

The only MMO that might ride on a wave of success "similiar" to WoW is gonna be Star Wars TOR...and why? Cause it's like the PERFECT WoW clone, with its own franchise that is loved by millions all over the world.

I personally think SW TOR is crap, but it won't change the fact that it will prolly have the most amount of subscribers after WoW.

FFXIV will never reach anywhere close to 1M and SE would be good to realize that and work towards their actual "fanbase" which will be the ones who will support and play this game for years.

Have you seen all the SW vidoes? It's definately not a WOW clone. The game does look amazing and i too think it will be a big success but that means nothing. A lot of pple thought, Age of Conan would be great and then LOTRO and then Warhammer and then AION.... which all disappointed and failed because they hyped the shit out of their game without being able to backup their claims.

[Tigercub]

I saw a thread this week asking for exactly that. "Plz bring back the grinding camps, we want to spend hours grinding 1 monster and that's all FFXIV needs to be saved" and there was like over 20 likes....

I have no problem with grind camps, they're far less annoying than the roaming grind parties we have now. I thought the real issue you were bringing up was the sitting around waiting for a party for hours and having no alternatives to leveling. FFXIV has solo grinding, leves, behests, dungeons and quests, plus SE is working on more, so you don't have to attend grind camps if you don't want to. In order to make the situation similar to how FFXI's used to be, they'd have to abolish those alternatives.

This is the kind of thing I was talking about. Taking pieces from FFXI doesn't make it FFXI-2.