FFXIV Population Continually Rising - Server Queues

[Naqaj]

FFXIV will continue to have a steady population with its extremely loyal fan base but will undoubtedly decrease with its soon to be Subscription, Guild Wars II (Most likely Late December), SWTOR (Confirmed for Late December) and Diablo 3 (Mid January 2012), but will come back strong with PS3 release, future updates and 2.0 .

Sorry for OT, but GuildWars 2 is not a December release, they plan on starting closed beta in December. Also no subscription required so might not even be direct competition except for player time. So far it's only SWTOR in the MMO genre that's clashing with the subscription switch date, and opinions on it are somewhat mixed among the MMO audience.

[Bahn]

Saronia hasn't gotten that much bigger since 1.19 - there's a bit of a population increase, but not to a point where there's server queues. In fact, the population is small enough where I can still recognize a handful of player's names often enough while going all over Eozorea.

At this point I think a lot of smaller population servers should be merged, as a previous poster pointed out - or as you call them "ghost servers". Heck, at this point, I'd like for my small playing group of 3 players to be able to move our characters to a more populated server.

[Avraym]

Sorry for OT, but GuildWars 2 is not a December release, they plan on starting closed beta in December. Also no subscription required so might not even be direct competition except for player time. So far it's only SWTOR in the MMO genre that's clashing with the subscription switch date, and opinions on it are somewhat mixed among the MMO audience.

I just googled release date for GW2 :P lol.

Sure has taken them forever and a day to release.

[Bahn]

Sorry for OT, but GuildWars 2 is not a December release, they plan on starting closed beta in December. Also no subscription required so might not even be direct competition except for player time. So far it's only SWTOR in the MMO genre that's clashing with the subscription switch date, and opinions on it are somewhat mixed among the MMO audience.

Mixed? Every single player that was playing this past beta test weekend (myself included) was sad to see the beta test weekend end. This is merely a personal anecdote, before the weekend test servers shut down on Sunday, people asked others if they would play the game and/or come back to it when December rolls around. Almost every single one of them said yes. I'm 50/50 on dropping FFXIV for SWTOR until 2.0 comes out myself, as SWTOR pretty much has all the MMO tropes and content that XIV does not have and will not have until patches are implemented, whether it's a few months to a year down the line. It's also very solo to lowman friendly with a great and class based quest storyline that is fully voiced and that is accessible at the very start of the game (as opposed to in 'spurts' every 4-10 levels).

Could you please point me to to these reviews stating otherwise?

[Naqaj]

There are no reviews, it's not released yet. Just follow the smoke trails left by the fanboys who ravaged any preview or first look that even dared to mention its game design is somewhat similar to WoW. 't was a nasty sight indeed.

I never meant to indicate in any way that it's not a good game, just that there are quite a few voices out there who would have loved it if Bioware took just a few more risks to break new ground.
And comparing it to XIV is ... not saying much.

And sorry, we're derailing even more now.