Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

[Talraen]

The RotZ graph shows ~82% of the player base on or past Ark Angels, which would qualify them for Sky.

~18% on Ark Angles, ~10% on The Sealed Shrine, ~8% on The Celestial Nexus, ~22% on Awakening, and ~24% on The Last Verse.

That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

The RotZ graph shows ~82% of the player base on or past Ark Angels, which would qualify them for Sky.

~18% on Ark Angles, ~10% on The Sealed Shrine, ~8% on The Celestial Nexus, ~22% on Awakening, and ~24% on The Last Verse.

I would argue that this is because most players who couldn't get to that point quit the game, and are not counted in those statistics. I am certainly not one of the 82%, as I never got past the dunes.

[Ibi]

That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

The 7th Census, taken two years earlier, already had 77.9% of the player base with Sky access, so the portion of players taking that long is minimal.

Unfortunately that's the earliest survey that has the expansion data, so it's not clear how long it was really taking people. Or, possibly more meaningfully, how long it was taking them after they reached 75 and started working towards end game.

[ValentineSnow]

number of players really doesn't say anything about which game is better. Mass market appeal doesn't mean a game is good. It's like saying "More people play Mario than dark souls, therefore Mario must be a better game". No, not really, it just has a lesser barrier of entry so 3 year olds can play it.

[stardrifter]

The only thing I really want from FFXI is the horizontal progression, and to make things a bit harder to obtain. I don't need instant gratification. Even when it came to new jobs I liked having to go through a "tough" quest to unlock it, felt better somehow. I know unpopular opinion...

FFXIV is a better game than FFXI for many reasons but it did have more character and depth, people saying go back to FFXI, I say go back to WoW - vertical progression is boring and we're already feeling the effects from it in FFXIV.

[Recruiter]

There are many things that XI do right that it makes no sense they aren't in XIV. We're already porting things that don't make sense like mobs so why not more. (XIV angler fish walk, XI angler fish floats in the air, that's weird.)

• BCNMs/KSNMs. Can be spawned using protean crystals for example.
• NMs. Real NMs that take time and effort to kill, and rewards loot, not zerg FATEs for glamors. Force spawned or on a short timer like 1.0
• Loot Diverstiy. XI kept adding loot for ALL levels and not just lv1/cap. This includes interesting stats and even hidden effects. You know, like an RPG.
• Interesting Mob mechanics: Some mobs link with their same kind, others aggro low hp, magic, track by scent and lose you if you cross water. Other mobs only pop at night or get stronger at night, weather changes the kind of sprites in the area. 1.0 had mobs that followed you out of curiosity such as goats. We've seen some of these return for Eureka and that's good.

[Dzian]

That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

to be honest it doesn't matter if it was 6 years. as long as the census your looking at was pre abbyssea then zilart was STILL relevant content.. and that's the only thing that matters.. FFXI was after all a game you could take your time with.. you didn't have to get content done on day one...

it'd like taking savage clear rates 4 months after 4.2 landed and dismissing them because its by ffxiv standards it's ancient content... FFXIV is much a game where if you don't do content straight away you're likely to struggle with it or everyone would expect you to be fully familier... look at shinryu story where just days after the expension people were already abandoning it soon as it came up in trials cos people should have already done it by now..

or sigma scape when wasn't even a week old and people were complaining on the forums and reddit about people not knowing the fight or looking up guides...

[Talraen]

to be honest it doesn't matter if it was 6 years. as long as the census your looking at was pre abbyssea then zilart was STILL relevant content.. and that's the only thing that matters.. FFXI was after all a game you could take your time with.. you didn't have to get content done on day one...

The vast majority of FFXI players never did any endgame at all, and spent 95% of their play time leveling. Incidentally, the experience Eureka was trying to recreate.

Also I spent literally years trying to get people to run Garrison so I could get a Mannequin, without any success. FFXI gave absolutely no incentive to do old content. FFXIV's roulettes, on the other hand, do. The only content in FFXIV you can't just queue for and expect to get reasonably quickly are Coil, Alexander, and everything Savage/Extreme. All other content remains playable long after day one.

To be fair, FFXI didn't require you to do things on day one, either. It just required you to have a competent static party to do anything other than just level. Which, to be clear, is a bad thing.

[SannaR]

I said the reskined monsters part in that XI had the same thing to be a counter point to the person who said XI had more variety of monsters. To the combat sure you couldn't see how far the aoe was, but if you fought X amount of monsters you knew that if they petrified you either A normally could just stand behind them or look away. Which we do in XIV as well. Once you saw how a monster type fought and encountered a different type you had a good idea how their basics would be. Same thing as here. I don't know about anyone else, but I hated when I would be at max heal range and still be within a select few NM's more dangerous aoes and have to spend time healing yourself. Being slept by other people's monster's was also so fun...

[Critical-Limit]

A) You sucked at it. You were a ween who'd hardly played an MMO let alone an online game and didn't fully understand the constrictions the medium possesses, and...

Condescending. The reason difficult mobs don't work is cuz
1.) Ilvl increase
2.) trash mobs in ffxiv are uninteresting. It's just do your rotation, dodge lights.

Mazes and unique pathways don't work in this game because there is no open world adventure at all, so open world in this game is a illusion, when you're really just traveling A to B with no danger cuz mobs always stop chasing you. You obviously didn't play 11 because there were areas where the structure of the map could change. Routes that worked before won't this time.

Things to discover?
It's called randomization. If you don't know what is popping up when, or events. You can create infinite exploring. Problem is ffxiv has static fates that are always the same and in the same place and it's not thought provoking at all. Nodes are always exact same place. Just everything in ffxiv is predictable.

All of what OP said is possible.