Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by FizzleofHyperion

If the majority of the players are waking up and not wanting this crazy item hunt and want something different why not just give it to us.

Unfortunately, I think you'll find that in the long run it's far from a majority of players that want something more like FFXI's structure. There's not, to my knowledge, any horizontal progression game that has a subscriber base as large as this one's (with perhaps roughly 700k actively playing subscribers and more that are subscribed) and definitely none with a population anywhere approaching WoW's. From what I recall, FFXI peaked at somewhere between 500k and 750k subscribers, but how many of those were actually active is anyone's guess. FFXIV is a much younger game with more subscriptions than that, at least judging by what data's available to us, as is WoW, and part of what makes that possible is that the "vertical treadmill" is better at encouraging players to continue subscribing.

I would like to see more variety in gear stats and also more variety in the number of gear sets available for any given raid tier (and personally I think perhaps a 9 month cycle for raid tiers, as opposed to a 6 month one, with larger raids would suit me better), but given the current state of the MMO market and what consumers in general seem to want, any major shifts to horizontal progression as a whole for FFXIV are very unlikely.