I'm sorry, but that's not what I said. I said brand loyalty needs to considered. And that I'm curious how many stuck it out because of that. Let me quite myself for you:

Peaking as the eighth most subscribers at that time certainly isn't anything to scoff at. But I'm curious, and I know we'll never know, how many of those 500,000 stuck it out because the game was called Final Fantasy.
How is that an "unequivocal statement of fact" when I said "I know we'll never know"?

Did you even read anything I wrote? Or are you just exercising a form of verbal diarrhea?

As for the rest of you post, it's all basically non sequitur. I'm certain you didn't even really read anything I wrote, because your arguing against points I never made. Or you're blindly ignoring other things.

So I'll respond to where you actually talk about what I'm talking about and point out how yet again you didn't even read my posts.

And just like the bots argument (which you omitted in your response), all other MMOs have trials, unsustained accounts, RMT accounts and legit players with multiple accounts. Like I said before, if you're going to bring those aspects into your argument, then you need to bring the same aspects into play for all other MMOs you're comparing it to.

FFXI was not the only MMO with trial accounts, unsustained users, multiple accounts and RMT/bot accounts figured into its numbers. Regardless, FFXI maintained ~500,000 accounts for about 7 years into its service, while other, supposedly "more casual and mainstream friendly" MMOs around it dropped down to ~200k within their first year.

Now in case you don't realize it, I'm granting you your point about bots/trials and such figuring into the 500k total. I'm simply stating that on balance, it doesn't really matter. All other MMOs have bots, RMT, trials and such as well. Regardless, FFXI's population almost 7 years into its service was double that of many others only 1 year into theirs. You can't dismiss that just because it doesn't suit your narrative.

I know you don't want to admit it, but no matter how you spin or dismiss it, FFXI has been a very successful MMO.
Do I need to quote myself again? I guess I do.

tl;dr: There's no doubt XI was a financial success. There's also no doubt that those sustained subscribers found something wonderful in their own experience. However, to use numbers produced by a company to promote their product to try and justify a very specific aspect of a service that has been running for 10 years now is flawed. Some people enjoyed level caps, some dealt with it in the promise of something else they might enjoy.

And all of that is irrelevant to XIV as the developers need to let the game stand on its own legs without making it "like XI" or "not like "XI." They now better than anyone what worked and what didn't.
There, from my first post, in plain bolded text. I say XI was a success.

So tell me again what I did a didn't say.

My entire point is that using that 500,000 to support a very specific aspect of XI is a fallacy. Whether or not that number was 500,000 players or 500,000 accounts was just a side point. But I took the time to bold the above quote in my first post to point out that despite that, I wasn't trying to discredit XI's success. Only to point out some factors that play into that number.

I could come on here and say "In XI pick axes and hatchets and fishing rods broke and that game had 500,000 subscriptions for six years so that should happen in XIV."

You see? It's the same argument people have been making for level capped content and HNM claim wars and a litany of other things they specifically enjoyed. And it's not wrong for them to have enjoyed it, but it is wrong to assume that several hundred thousand people played a game for years because of that one specific thing.

I know people who hated Sky, but they stuck with the LS and did it because they loved Dynamis. There were plenty of cases of people doing things in XI that they didn't care for because that was the basic structure of the game: help under the assumption you will be helped.

That's all I'm saying. Yes, XI was a success. But SE can't reproduce what people liked about it. Because several hundred thousand people all liked certain things and loathed others. By the time they'd get through with doing that they'll have to have made an HD version of XI -- which some people would probably still complain that it doesn't "look" like XI because the graphics are too good and it doesn't have that old school feel.