"Real ID" Concept

[kyuven]

What's really sad is that back in 2003 when I started playing FFXI we had POL which at the very least gave us cross server communication. Fast forward to 2015... It's hard to tell if they've made any advancements.

from what I understand, PlayOnline was a nightmare for both players and developers.
The former is at least true, given they used it as a download client and it was notoriously slow.

[Nikita]

from what I understand, PlayOnline was a nightmare for both players and developers.
The former is at least true, given they used it as a download client and it was notoriously slow.

The only nightmare I can recall is all of the sexually frustrated teenagers ERPing in the chat rooms during maintenance.

If you saw the original POL concept video, you'd know Blizzard made it a reality for all intents and purposes. Not only do they have cross server dungeons, chat, blacklists, and grouping, you can even talk to people in different games! Hell, you don't even have to be in game to talk to them.

Here I am playing FFXIV in 2015 and I can't even blacklist some annoying jerk in my duty finder party.

These aren't new concepts. It's about time they brought us into the modern era.

[kyuven]

These aren't new concepts. It's about time they brought us into the modern era.

You should, however, ask yourself WHY they would drop the concept and why only about 4 different games/companies actually use the concept at all.
EVE, GW2 and TESO don't really count since they use megaservers.
Cryptic games (NW, STO, and CO) use the concept but all three are built on the same network framework.
Blizzard games use it but again, they're built on the framework from the word go, and it took them nearly a decade to get everything to work the way it does.
The EverQuest games use it as well but again, and this is becoming a theme, they were built on the same framework as well.

FFXIV was not built on the PlayOnline framework, probably due in part to being unable to do cross-platform integration with the FFXI platforms, of which there are about 4. One of which was a miracle to get at all since they don't have it for 14.