Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

[MistakeNot]

Content in 14 doesn’t have the staying power of 11. Due to linear progression once the new patch comes out the old content is all obsolete and there’s no reason to run it anymore other than glamour. Content only lasts about a month in ffxiv. This isn’t the case in ffxi, 12 years later and people are still doing dynamis (the first endgame content added).

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

[Rinuko]

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

Odd, not a lot of player plays a 10+ year old mmo vs their latest mmo. /thinking emoji

[KisaiTenshi]

Massive city battles with invading forces.

V1.0 had this, various other MMO's have this. It generally results in not being very fun for the people who don't want to participate. Like ideally, the mechanism for this is to have a city that is regularly assaulted by various classes of monsters (eg from easy zombies to hard dragons) and you have to participate in some meaningful manner to get any reward. It could even be done in a way that crafting and gathering classes can be used to build defenses.

However as much as I like the idea in concept, in practice, players and bots just zerg the map and no strategy is involved.

Ferry/Raft rides with random events.

V1.0 also had actual "ferry" zones. Well, until they got rid of the Ferry entirely. Another MMORPG I've played had something like this as well. To get to a "fishing ship" required triggering a certain event.

Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover.

What people want when they ask for "meaningful exploration" is that they want dungeon/tower/castle type locations that actually require "solving" (eg "The Sunken Temple of Qarn"'s type of puzzles but actually open different paths through the dungeons, and they change if you don't solve them correctly.)

Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam.

Combo-spam is what every turn-based system uses because that's what is less cheatable and most fair, it also gives it enough turn around time to verify that the combos and skills are valid. Action MMORPG's (where you have to manually dodge as well) are extremely cheatable and tend to suck if you don't live in the same city that the servers are in. This is why many Japanese and Korean games tend to suck when they are localized to for North America/Europe, because they don't have the sub-16ms (1 frame) latency to allow all players fair play.

[Talraen]

Up until Eureka's release, there were a number of people calling for something akin to FFXI's open world leveling system. So apparently some people thought those were a "good part" of FFXI.

What we should all be learning from Eureka is that implementing stuff from FFXI doesn't work because FFXIV is a different game.

Odd, not a lot of player plays a 10+ year old mmo vs their latest mmo. /thinking emoji

FFXIV has far more players right now than FFXI did at the height of its popularity. MistakeNot is exactly correct: the stuff that was appealing about FFXI appeals to a much smaller group of people than what is appealing about FFXIV.

[SannaR]

Skill based? you mean stand there whacking at a mob until you've gained enough tp to use a weapon skill? Yes there are exceptions to that, but that was the majority of XI's combat. Also kiting a monster because a tank standing in one spot and getting whacked on wasn't a good idea doesn't take much skill. Neither does stun locking things to avoid the worst attacks a monster can do.

Meaningful exploration? There wasn't any. The one way drops were more annoying than anything.

Also I guess you never noticed all the reskined crab, fish, leaches, ghosts ect that XI had you whacking on to level up.

[Remedi]

Frankly I don't like when ppl talk of exploration as a lasting content because it isn't. Once you have seen it and found it that novelty is gone unless you deliberately make it very hard to explore or gating it somehow and even then ppl will find ways
Plus now we live in the digital age, compared to say vanilla wow or FFXI prime time , information sources are much more widespread, to the point that imho they killed exploration entirely

Sometimes what we want is a conglomerate of different factors that can no longer be recreated unless we deliberately decide to downgrade ourselves.
That's also why I'm very skeptical about the staying power of vanilla servers on wow.
Ppl that really enjoyed that type of game will love it, but what will happen once all content is done for them? I'm honestly not in touch with how far the private servers have gone in vanilla wow, but once you clear naxxramas 1.0 what's for them exactly?

[Dzian]

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

I often wonder. In it's prime ffxi had an active playerbase of a little over 500k players.

Currently ffxi has an active playerbase of somewhere around 500k players. They're really not that different..

The rent that many more people playing at all...

Ffxi was largely unmarketed in the West. Where ffxiv is all over social media and various ad campaigns trying to draw players in. I mean sure it's had 10 million players but it's really struggling to push past it's predecessor. Which maintained the same level of playerbase with only a fraction of the sales. And next to no marketting at all.

Skill based? you mean stand there whacking at a mob until you've gained enough tp to use a weapon skill? Yes there are exceptions to that, but that was the majority of XI's combat..

Bit more to it than that. You generally had to be a bit more aware in xi. You didn't have red circles and telegraphs all over the place telling you what was going on and where you had to pay attention and figure it out. Mechs were also a bit more punishing if failed. In ffxiv you can blatantly ignore so many of them and it just doesn't matter. You will never die

[Talraen]

I often wonder. In it's prime ffxi had an active playerbase of a little over 500k players.

Currently ffxi has an active playerbase of somewhere around 500k players. They're really not that different..

That is not a valid comparison. 500k was FFXI's maximum subscriber base. 500k is the "active" number for the FFXIV census, which includes only characters that have completed the level 65 dungeon. There are many paying subscribers who have not done that. I attempted an apples-to-apples comparison on this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...83#post4547683. To be fair, I assume far more people complete content in FFXIV than did in FFXI, but even given that, FFXIV's endgame community is several times the size of FFXI's.

[Dzian]

]To be fair, I assume far more people complete content in FFXIV than did in FFXI, but even given that, FFXIV's endgame community is several times the size of FFXI's.

Whee do you figure that. If you Google play online vanadiel census for various years. You tend to see thecendgame community makes up a massive segment of xis playerbase.

In comparison I think even normal mode raids have a participation level of well under half of the playerbase. Seem to recall yoshi saying low 40s in discussion about creators lower difficulty and its impact on participation some time ago.

Ex primals and savage are lower still.

[Talraen]

Whee do you figure that. If you Google play online vanadiel census for various years. You tend to see thecendgame community makes up a massive segment of xis playerbase.

In comparison I think even normal mode raids have a participation level of well under half of the playerbase. Seem to recall yoshi saying low 40s in discussion about creators lower difficulty and its impact on participation some time ago.

Ex primals and savage are lower still.

By "endgame community" I mean the pool of players who have fulfilled the requirements to do endgame content. And "endgame content" in this context means level 70 content. In FFXIV, that's everyone who's completed the story. (If nothing else, they all qualify for Eureka.) The FFXIV census currently lists 549k players who have completed the level 65 dungeon, and it's reasonable to assume that most of those have gone on to finish the rest of the game.

By comparison, look at some FFXI statistics: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/gui...192.1481641280

Less than half the player base (which peaked around 500k) qualifies for Sea, or any other gated endgame content aside from Sky (which is 6 years old at the time of this census). Because completing the story in FFXI was so difficult, the pool of players who could do endgame content was much smaller.

None of this means anything about who actually does endgame content, but FFXIV's available community is very clearly far larger.

Contrary to popular belief, FFXI used to be hugely popular and used to be the second MMORPG behind wow for a while.

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...%2Fm%2F064ln09

Data doesn't show FFXIV to be more popular than FFXI was during its prime time.

Google trendlines are hardly indicative of who was actually playing the game more. The top related query is "ffxi wiki." The fact that FFXI was often too obtuse to progress through without Googling is neither proof that it was more popular, nor a point in its favor.