Originally Posted by
Prothescar
@rate
Direct measurement of subscribers for a game like XIV is difficult, and is a much less reasonable metric to measure the popularity of the game without taking an amalgamated average over the course of several months. For someone who seems to be so interested in MMO subscription trends, I'm surprised you haven't understood this on your own and taken it into consideration, but then again most of your posts are devoted to XIV bashing so the bias isn't totally ruled out.
Think of the subscription total as being the posts that hold up a rollercoaster's rails. During periods of content activity, i.e. patches, mostly major content patches, the posts will be high, towering well above the ground and possibly even over the posts of many other rollercoasters. During periods of less content activity, the posts will be far shorter, creating dips and dives in between each one of the taller posts. This is an unavoidable circumstance in today's MMO economy; WoW sees this too. In between expansion packs and major patches, WoW loses millions of subscribers at a time only to regain them when the next big thing rolls around. It's a symptom of a vprog model and one that will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. In order to assess the average height of the rollercoaster, you need to measure each set of posts individually and average them together; taking the values of the highest posts, or in this case the lowest ones, and using them as what you can expect from the rollercoaster throughout the entire ride is foolish.
At the end of the day, the cost:reward ratio for XIV is significantly higher than that of XI, and the amount of effort and resources required to maintain and produce more things and receive more of an audience for XI was deemed too high for one reason or another. It's basic economics and it isn't difficult to assess why the decision was made; if you want to blame anyone, blame whoever decided that building the framework of an MMO on architecture that would obviously become antiquated relatively quickly was a good idea.