Quote Originally Posted by Alahra View Post
True, I probably should have been a little more specific. Guild Wars 2 is a bit of a special case in that it's a lot closer to a game like Diablo III than it is a more traditional subscription MMO, in addition to being entirely free to play. If Guild Wars 2 had a subscription fee on top of a focus on horizontal progression, I don't know that it would be as popular as it is.

As I mentioned, I do think there's room for some more horizontal aspects in XIV, and I'd honestly like to see them here, but I can't imagine we'll ever see a full-scale shift to it, as the subscription aspect seems pretty central to SE's business model for the game. They're also, I have to assume, very wary of full-scale shifts. They tried a couple times to move FFXI to a more vertical model (in the Abyssea era, and more recently with Seekers of Adoulin), and the player backlash, and indeed, subscription bleed, was hugely significant. The people playing the game liked the way it was, and although FFXI had stopped growing, the developers probably learned that a game has a certain natural level beyond which it probably won't expand, despite any massive changes to the overall structure.

That makes me doubt that they'll do anything major to change FFXIV's underlying structure, which have proven to be far more successful than FFXIV was at launch (and also more successful than FFXI ever was).
True, GW2 not having a sub fee increases it's appeal to people I am sure. Though, it's definitely successful and shouldn't be ignored is all

Personally, I played about 1k hours in GW2 and am at 2.5k hours in FFXIV. I think FFXIV, overall, is way better. GW2 ignoring vertical progression was a big reason I didn't like it, and I think they failed horribly on their implementation of balancing horizontal progression.

I wouldn't want FFXIV to fully move to horizontal, I just want some horizontal progression. In 3.x they made secondary stats even more useless than before, heck even primary stats are becomming less useful. I upgraded my Eso 200 weapon to Relic 210, which has 3 weapon damage and 8 INT. The secondary stats are slightly worse, but 3 WD should overshadow them pretty substantially. My DPS went from 1333 to 1343 on a dummy parse. It's a good thing I slaved for hours to get that increase. /s