Quote Originally Posted by Lorielle View Post
-I- can log in and feel the lack of activity on my server. It is NOT as active as it was in the past. Neither is my FC. While it is NOT the populace, it still goes to show that -people are leaving-. Gradually. Slowly. The game is on a decline. No one said how steep this decline is.
It's called churn and is a feature of the mmo genre. Friends leave. Guilds/FCs fall apart. Game populations flux between servers. This happened even in WoW during the height of its popularity in TBC/WotLK. All because your friends leave, your FC is less active and your server "feels" less populated is NOT representative of the health of the game as a whole. It is literally the definition of anecdotal evidence.

Most of my friends have left the game by this point so I have to invest time in finding new friends which is rather easy since plenty of new people are on my server (either as transfers or brand new players). Furthermore I'm on a supposedly "dead" server too but I see no shortage of new and old faces when I am traveling about.

The reality is based on the probable numbers we have gleamed from unofficial censuses the game is doing very well for an MMO, especially a sub fee mmo, in this day and age. During the 6.1 content drought at the start of the year FF14 had over 800k active players that were not bots which is pretty incredible when put into context of the industry as a whole. That said people do seem to burn out faster these days but that is entirely a symptom of the mmo genre being in decline and the changing tastes of the modern gamer.