Do you think all the development for the past few years was designed to slowly kill the game?

[dasva]

You know what they would do if they really wanted to kill it? Shut the servers down. There's no contract saying that they have to keep the servers going, so if they wanted to kill it, it would be easy.

Perhaps they want to but fear the outlash?

[ColenzoRidesAgain]

FFXI is your grandma that just entered hospice care. The doctors aren't actively killing her, but they aren't actively trying to keep her alive anymore.

Exactly how my grandmother died. She stopped receiving updates one day and then suddenly she died. God damn retirement homes.

[Draylo]

lol

[Fwahm]

Exactly how my grandmother died. She stopped receiving updates one day and then suddenly she died. God damn retirement homes.

Did they run out of First-half-of-the-20th-century dev kits?

[shen]

4. Absolutely no plans on server mergers, the only answer we got is "we will see how things look when November comes." Which is clearly fucking retarded. Are we supposed to be impressed by logging into a game in the middle of the week to see around 200 NA players running around or something? Half of those people are probably dual boxing on top of it. I think if they actually cared about player retention they wouldn't have let things get this bad

You realize we are not locked into servers, right? You can still server hop on our own. You don't need SE's permission. This is a perfect example of not killing the game, but not actively stopping it from dying, either. My LS is just a handful of friends, but some of us have managed to contact members cross server to join (through other mutual friends).

Admittedly, the server transfer restrictions should be lightened up a little. However, they've done a bit to help with that already so I'm not holding my breath.

[enoch]

You realize we are not locked into servers, right?

Slight derail, but I've always thought how they implemented server transfers was a detriment to the community. Especially toward the beginning it enabled a whole slew of drama with folks screwing over other folks and then hopping somewhere else with ill-gotten gains to do it again. They either didn't think about this sort of abuse or didn't care - but once it became known that it was a problem, they could've easily alleviated it by publishing a list of who transferred where and what their names were. The way they implemented transfers destroys the concept of reputation which is a cornerstone of a healthy community.

[Kanriel]

I consider SoA as a whole the best expansion they ever did. I don't see them trying to kill the game, but it's just old. People lose interest, and the new players for a MMO of this age are sorely lacking. This game was never widespread and popular to begin with, and now you have the still-a-juggernaut WoW and then the new FF MMO, which while not my cup of tea, is the most successful MMO to launch post-WoW. So why would you play FFXI? Not to mention I'm sure you can find a bunch of butthurt ex-players trashing it when google searching, I know I went through that phase for a while.

But I think it's clear their long term goals aren't very well established. The launch of SoA showed this, with their itemization issues and the eventual fix with ilvl gear.

As for the OP's OP: King camping killed so many players of this game, and it just got beyond terrible once all manner of decorum ended and it was blatant bot wars. Some people revel in that, others can't stand it and quit. There's only so long you can put the carrot on the stick before they stop wishing for carrot. Maybe not the best analogy, but fuck, people just gave up on the endless grind. It was a standard phenomenon for someone to get a relic and quit a few months afterwards. The grind takes its toll, and we hit a snowball of that during WotG. FFXI's thing was that it was addictive because of the grind, but like you'll see in your standard WoW population, if the updates have too long in between them, people unsub for a bit, until the next patch hits. FFXI did this during WotG, and all the addicts realized maybe they're better off not returning. And since this is a team game, you lose a few friends vital to the team, and maybe you can't do all the content anymore, and then you quit to join your friends.

There are all sorts of reasons why people left, and with the game being so dependent on others made it so every loss counted for more. If some of this solo-friendly content had been around in the early days, there's a chance we would not have lost so many people, who knows. But I do know the addition of solo-friendly content is a reaction to a problem, not an intentional cause of one.

[Clash Perez]

I think a pretty good case for Hanlon's Razor can be made here, though perhaps with inexperience and naïveté substituted for 'stupidity'.

I'm of the opinion that they were doing their best to muddle along in the bed that they'd made, which was the result of a grand vision implemented poorly.

A multi-platform, multi-language MMO was (and still is, as far as I know*) a novel thing, but the errors carried forward (hi2u, PS2 limitations) were an albatross that they just couldn't figure out how to shake.

Spoiler: show

*Yes, I know there's FFXIV, but the regional servers limit cross-language interaction considerably. Europe might be an exception, but hey, I played on a "US" server so I wouldn't know!

[D44kpunk]

nah they weren't trying to kill it off they were just too stupid to make the right decisions and wanted to "pave their own way" instead of copying things that other games did well

[rate]

This game was never widespread and popular to begin with, and now you have the still-a-juggernaut WoW and then the new FF MMO, which while not my cup of tea, is the most successful MMO to launch post-WoW. So why would you play FFXI?

Why do people perpetuate this nonsnse? FFXIV is not the most successful mmo since wow, it' has the same number of subscribers ffxi had at peak and many other mmo titles have had more subscribers.

FFXIV has 500k subscribers, please tell me you aren't one of these registered players = subscribers people?

[rate]

nah they weren't trying to kill it off they were just too stupid to make the right decisions and wanted to "pave their own way" instead of copying things that other games did well

Well as I say, Square were a company that refused to make leveling faster, refused to make kings force popped, and refused to a lot of things because they knew it made players play longer. For a sub based mmo, you want a player taking a month to level a job, you want someone doing limbus for over a year or more to get a full set.

Suddenly they made a successor to FFXI, they made everything easy mode on ffxi and now they are saying they have a shortage of dev kits. You don't think all those things are linked?

[Kanriel]

Why do people perpetutate this nonsnse? FFXIV is not the most successful mmo since wow, it' has the same number of subscribers ffxi had at peak and many other mmo titles have had more subscribers.

FFXIV has 500k subscribers, please tell me you aren't one of these registered players = subscribers people?

If many other MMO's have had more subscribers, why has every single MMO post-WoW gone f2p shortly after launch?

[NynJa]

Well as I say, Square were a company that refused to make leveling faster, refused to make kings force popped, and refused to a lot of things because they knew it made players play longer. For a sub based mmo, you want a player taking a month to level a job, you want someone doing limbus for over a year or more to get a full set.

Suddenly they made a successor to FFXI, they made everything easy mode on ffxi and now they are saying they have a shortage of dev kits. You don't think all those things are linked?

You must go through a lot of tin foil, dont you?

[rate]

If many other MMO's have had more subscribers, why has every single MMO post-WoW gone f2p shortly after launch?

No other MMO in history would of shamed the creators more by being average after a remake, arr is a game in the flagship brand and they staked their reputation on spending almost unlimited amounts of money and staling almost all their other projects to remake it. You really think they will ever admit they did anything else than make wow 2? They tout registered player numbers like they mean something, that says it all doesn't it?

I'm not sure why you're arguing anyway, Square have stated a few times they have 500k subscribers and 500k for a 3 region mmo really isn't something outstanding. It's ok, it's not really laudable.

Swtor peaked at nearly 2 million subscribers (3 times as many subscribers as FFXIV had at peak) and went free to play when they had 1 million because the dominant factor was making money, the dominant factor for ffxiv is avoiding humiliation. They have shown they will throw almost infinite money at the game with little chance of making it back just to save face for the company and the brand name.

[rate]

You must go through a lot of tin foil, dont you?

of course, chicken is delicious.

You have to baste if correctly but if you do it's some damn good eating.

[vivbiibasjiu]

Slight derail, but I've always thought how they implemented server transfers was a detriment to the community. Especially toward the beginning it enabled a whole slew of drama with folks screwing over other folks and then hopping somewhere else with ill-gotten gains to do it again. They either didn't think about this sort of abuse or didn't care - but once it became known that it was a problem, they could've easily alleviated it by publishing a list of who transferred where and what their names were. The way they implemented transfers destroys the concept of reputation which is a cornerstone of a healthy community.

Yeah pretty much anyone who jumps servers is extremely suspicious. They either did something bad on their server, have a bad reputation, or have no friends because they're assholes, or no one wants to be their friend because they suck, etc. etc. Any normal "good" player would have no reason to change servers. It's always something shady and sketchy going on. I don't trust server hoppers. If you don't have at least one friend on your server after 13 years you must be impossible to get along with, or you robbed a linkshell bank or something

[Spicyryan]

Aliens.

[shen]

Yeah pretty much anyone who jumps servers is extremely suspicious. They either did something bad on their server, have a bad reputation, or have no friends because they're assholes, or no one wants to be their friend because they suck, etc. etc. Any normal "good" player would have no reason to change servers. It's always something shady and sketchy going on. I don't trust server hoppers. If you don't have at least one friend on your server after 13 years you must be impossible to get along with, or you robbed a linkshell bank or something

Or all of their friends/LS mates quit and they're looking for a new LS. I know a guy who came back after a hiatus and no one else played, our LS made contact with him and he jumped over to our server.

[BerenTebogo]

It's really not worth responding to anything Viv says.

[arus2001]

I dunno, I sensed some sarcasm in there.