Blue Mage might actually be a good thing.

[Aylis]

I feel if its executed right it very well might help with the games longevity. I had a talk with a friend and were wondering if maybe there was some kind of shake up over at SE and they had to do something drastic and new to change how the game is played to try and woo players that either have quit or are hanging by a very loose thread in regards to their future in FFXIV. We all seen how SE loves to tote around the "15 million plus service accounts" line, however based on those lodestone mines the games active player roster fluctuates from between 600k to 800k depending on weither the game is in new patch mode or four months after patch mode. I wanna say which is average to above average in terms of MMO populations. However a game with both the Final Fantasy and Square Enix names, and considering how much time and money they sunk into promoting and advertising the game. If the lodestone mines are near right then the active player numbers is really quite...abysmal.

If say at best the game has a active population of 800k, that means it failed to win over 14.2 million people, and those people talk and share any "avoid this game like the plague" thoughts they may have. Weither it was the MSQ roadblock or it's game play, those players are gone. I know this is a FF game and lore and story are a big thing in the game, however a good chunk of MMO players when looking at a new MMO ask "is this game fun to play?" "is its game play worth going through a bazillion story quests and follow it to unlock everything and keep playing when it's done?" For 14.2 million players, that answer was "no, no its not".

At the end of the day FFXIV is an MMO first, and it's a business to make money. It wouldn't shock me if they would be willing to sacrifice loseing say 1000 subscribers that are upset about BLU ending up like this if it means maybe bringing back in say 100k of those that already quit due to the game play by making something that breaks away from its original game play and have them thinking "hey this game isn't so bad now."

Weither it was a good idea or not remains to be seen until the class has launched and has been out for a week or so and we gotten the chance to play it and see for ourselves and word of mouth spreads.