
Originally Posted by
Striker44
Is FFXIV in trouble?
In a word - no.
In three words - not even close.
In three other words - quite the opposite.
Don't let the forums fool you. We represent only the smallest grain of sand compared to the playerbase, and people who take the time to visit the forums, make an account, and post here are far and away not representative of the typical player.
If you look over the history of FFXIV, each successive expansion has shown a steady rise in the size of the active playing population, and EW has continued that trend. There was an anomalous spike with the famous "WoW exodus," but if you remove that one-time gigantic explosion of people and subsequent fall-off (as most came to realize FFXIV and WoW are designed with two different audiences in mind), you'll see the same steady trend still ultimately occurred. At every comparable data point along the way (e.g. just before patch x.2, the first month of x.5, etc.), EW has had the highest active playerbase to date, surpassing ShB (which itself had been the highest up to that point).
Heck, with the latest patch, Aether hunt trains went back to announcing some of them only server-wide instead of DC-wide because they were getting too large. I can still queue for practically anything on tank or healer, including random dungeons or raids I haven't done in a while for WT, and get it to pop within a few minutes.
Will the typical formula that SE has had enormous success with eventually become stale? Yeah. It already has for some people, as evidenced by the forum here. But there's still such a reliable influx of new (and returning) players that it more than makes up for that. At some point down the road, the steady rise FFXIV is still experiencing will eventually reach a peak and then start declining. It's possible we're still going up. It's possible EW represents the peak. But we're certainly not on the decline yet, and even once that starts, the population will remain healthy for a considerable period of time even if the dev team did nothing to change course.
So no, FFXIV isn't in trouble. In fact - it's the complete opposite. It's thriving, and either at its peak or still climbing towards it.