Highly Notorious Monsters

[Alhanelem]

Can you honestly tell me that HNM's would hurt FFXIV's chance for future success?

Hurt? No. But their impact on the game as far as attracting new customers and getting people to play and keep playing will be minimal at best.

The number of people that will play HNMs, regardless of how good or bad they are, is not going to be high compared to the total playerbase. Their ability to influence the game as a whole will be limited in either direction.

During Zilart, which primarily was SKY/HNM/Dynamis for endgame, there were a little over 200,000 people subbed (this was late 2004).

Comparitively, FFXIV has around 10-12,000 subscriptions. Seems like they were doing something right in their prior MMO.

You're right- but that "something" that was right was a lot of things, it wasn't just or even mostly HNMs. Please, quit pretending that HNMs were the sole/primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people played FFXI. If that were true, there would have been 1000 people in the dragon's aery every fafnir pop instead of 100-200.