Why vertical progression is poorly implemented

[Gunspec]

That's a horrible, horrible, absolutely abysmal reasoning.

FFXI is more than 12 years old. Do you honestly expect people to play the same game, with the same amount of love and passion, every day for 12 years?

I said "of "former FFXI players" I've met in the last decade" as in I met people ten years ago who had already stopped playing. Throughout the last 10 years, I've probably met two or three dozen "former" players who all started and stopped at different points in the game's life cycle, while in that same decade I never met an active subscriber. Maybe its just the circles of people I meet, but something is clearly a bit strange there.

No matter if people want to admit it or not 11 was highly successful and the fact that its still going speaks for itself.

Runescape is still going after 15 years. It has to do entirely with the strange little communities that develop around a game, and I honestly can't say that any single factor in an online game is responsible for creating or destroying such a community.