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

[Mojo]

The notion that SE would deliberately kill off the game is laughable. Nothing I can say is going to change your minds.

[D44kpunk]

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

F2P and cash shops have proven to be an infinitely better business model.. so.. idk what logic is

[rate]

The notion that SE would deliberately kill off the game is laughable. Nothing I can say is going to change your minds.

They knew the game had a shelf life due to PS2 dev kits being the weak link, this was not a new revelation.

So they create a new game and slowly make this game less palatable to move them slowly over to that. Huge chunks of players left when they made abyssea because they thought it ruined the game, most of the serious guilds were destroyed by force spawn kings and easy content.

FFXI probably has another 2 years at the absolute most before they close it down, by that point there will be less than 10k people playing. Compared to the 200-300k if they had given most of them a reason to quit.

Put yourself in Square Enix shoes, you have a game that you know will be impossible to update once you run out of ps2 dev kits. You have 500k subscribers on that game, how do you try to retain as many as possible on the "replacement" while not causing a massive hate campaign against the company?

They tried everything they could to get xi players to move over, they even made xi almost exactly like xiv in the end.

If any of you played city of heroes you know the kind of long-term hatred closing a game down gets you.

[Mojo]

They knew the game had a shelf life due to PS2 dev kits being the weak link, this was not a new revelation.

So they create a new game and slowly make this game less palatable to move them slowly over to that. Huge chunks of players left when they made abyssea because they thought it ruined the game, most of the serious guilds were destroyed by force spawn kings and easy content.

FFXI probably has another 2 years at the absolute most before they close it down, by that point there will be less than 10k people playing. Compared to the 200-300k if they had given most of them a reason to quit.

Put yourself in Square Enix shoes, you have a game that you know will be impossible to update once you run out of ps2 dev kits. You have 500k subscribers on that game, how do you try to retain as many as possible on the "replacement" while not causing a massive hate campaign against the company?

They tried everything they could to get xi players to move over, they even made xi almost exactly like xiv in the end.

If any of you played city of heroes you know the kind of long-term hatred closing a game down gets you.

lol

[Tantalus]

An MMO is really all about goals, starting with Abyssea they sped up pretty much all the goals this game had and killed many of the things that kept people chugging along (king camping/low drop rates/long waits to access content/slow leveling). They are even doing things that speed up the few goals the game has left, needlessly banning people, closing down consoles and now the ace in the hole of stopping all content.

Now we finally get to the point that they are stopping all development because they "don't have enough dev units" this is not a new revelation for the developers. They have known of this problem for a long time now.

So do you think Square have had a grand design scheme to lose players and kill the game over the past few years?

Given what we know now it makes so much sense.

I think they're just rewarding those who stayed this long