SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[BlaiseArath]

horizontal progression is duuuuuuuuuumb. no one wants to spend all that time on gear that is a sidegrade. if you are one of the few people that do then FFXI is right there, go play it. FF14 is far more successful than 11 was they have no reason to go back to the model when the one being used in 14 is a proven success.

Well to be fair, FFXI came out back when MMOs weren't very popular or well known, that didn't happen til around WoW... and once WoW came out, it attracted pretty much everyone, and very few people would break away from WoW. While WoW still exists, you can see the discontent many of its fans have for it (at least vocal minority blah blah), and its popularity has dwindled a bit... plus, a MMOs are high in popularity these days and a lot of people "MMO hop" to the next cool thing. Plus, the absolute failure of 1.0 actually gave the game a lot of publicity, so believe it or no that benefited 2.0's release, as people wanted to see if it had improved. The stars aligned for XIV to become the success it is really.

The problem with is, XI wasn't very new player friendly for the longest time, so when it came to the point MMO popularity was being picked up, new players weren't helped to reach endgame and grew bored quite quickly, stunting the games over all growth. At its peak it did reach 500k subscribers and is still survived by a modest player base as people like to bring up.. pretty good for a game with "Dumb" progression system if you ask me.

FFXIV is by no means bad though, thats not what I'm getting at - nor do I think infinite side-grades is the best model (which is why XI did release newer, best in slot pieces often enough, the idiots will quote the same tired crap of 1-2 body pieces across 20 jobs being "the best" for a while meant the other 15 slots apparently never got upgraded?).