What is so bad about FFXI?

[Synfrag]

FFXI (Almost a decade of my life) was not very successful and that is where they wanted to change. For many of us that played XI there is no other MMO that compares in scale and feeling. But 90% of the western market has no care for feeling, they want action and instant gratification. This can be seen evidently in everything around us, Hollywood, TV, Team Sports and other social environments.

Take a look at another popular thing from Japan. I know not everyone is a fan of Anime or Manga but Japanese cartoons even have (most of the time) well developed stories and characters. Though there are some in the US that go to this level it is far more uncommon.

So what you are talking about is fundamental societal differences. It actually is apparent in games from other countries such as Korea with Aion and Tera. In those the focus is more shallow than most US/EU and JP games. It's all about killing each other and looking like a porn star doing it.

Most of the XI-2 opponents are people who didn't really find XI appealing and believe it or not, they are the vast majority of MMO players. There was a statistic once on one of the gaming websites unintentionally countering the Vana'diel census. I will try to find the source but the results were somewhere around 70% of the people surveyed played FFXI for less than 6 months with a large portion of them not playing beyond their first 30 days.

My point being XI had such a small market share even in comparison to other MMOs excluding WoW. In terms of an MMO it was not at all "Highly Successful". So why rebuild what wasn't great to the masses?