20th Anniversary Expectations...

XIV has been the reason for XIs decline. It's nice that you like it, but theres no reason you can't understand why others would hate it. I personally despise it, not just because it directly competes with XI and caused its decline, but because i don't enjoy it. What's lame is expecting people on an XI dedicated forum to like it lol. I'm sure if i go post on an XIV forum saying stop hating WoW, i would be attacked easily. These things aren't hard to get

I really never understood that mentality.

FFXI was made for PS2, it was never going to have full scale development past PS2's lifecycle, and even then, it lasted much longer than it should have on PS2.

This is just the natural progression of things. FFXI had many expansions, but never got even remotely as popular as WoW did, not even close. So SE decided to make a new MMO that would, and now look. FFXIV is massive, brings in tons of money, and is infinitely more popular than FFXI ever was.

I love FFXI, and I, as many others do I assume, play FFXI as my "main mmo" and go back to FFXIV for every patch for a few weeks. I love both games, and I'm happy both games are still getting updated. It's literally a miracle at this point that FFXI is even still getting updates at all. I can't imagine they see a lot of return on investment for this game. We get slow, small, and steady updates for a game long past its prime, I'll take that as a win.

Why is it hard to understand? I don't get that lol.

You just said it in your post, they forced XIV so hard and poured so much money and resources into it of course its gonna get more players. Every year that goes by that they advertise and promote that game and are completely silent on this one, of course XI is gonna lose more players. We just get less and less tbh and its not really fair considering we are still paying a sub fee. I don't care how long they planned for this game to last, if its still profitable and people are still paying for it then they should pay some attention to it as well. They aren't though because like you said, that game has become more popular with the masses. The difference in treatment between the two games is staggering.

Lets not assume that popularity instantly means the game is the next coming of christ either. People hated on WoW constantly thru XIs life, criticizing the gameplay and how popular it was and yet those exact same people went over to XIV happily to leave this game behind. Minecraft, Candy Crush, Fortnite must be the pinnacle of gaming. It's good and profitable for the company, but it doesn't mean that just because its popular that everyone should like it.

I think part of XI's decline (or lack of desired progress/evolution, however you wish to describe it) is due in part to SE not expecting it to last as long as it has and not having a viable plan in place to support it from the consumers' perspective. I don't think XIV is entirely to blame for that; rather, XIV (particularly the failed 1.0) was an attempt to "modernize" their vision of XI, without regard for players' expectations. Their "better" XI wasn't the upgraded XI we wanted, it was a different game.

How much of that has been realized by the people at SE with the ability (and budget) to effect the direction of XI is something we'll see soon, I guess.

Fix BLM pls.

Trash the resist wall, get rid of the mtdr.

Its hard to understand because your stance makes no sense.

You're claiming that FFXIV essentially killed FFXI. FFXI was declining long before FFXIV was even a thing. As mentioned, FFXI was never even remotely as popular as WoW was. FFXI is a hill, WoW is Mount Everest. It's not even close. This is after a lot of investment in the form of several expansions, leading to its peak in ToAU. It was never a dead MMO by any sense of the word, it just was never super big in comparison to the competition.

Dumping money into something doesn't instantly make it successful. FFXI got lots of investment, and was never super huge. A ton of money went into FFXIV 1.0, and it bombed. FFXIV is popular because it's design objectively resonates with more people than FFXI's design does.

It makes 0 sense for them to dump large amounts of money into a game that is in it's twilight years, was never super big to begin with, and is considered niche in today's market. They'd see a much higher return on investment putting that money into FFXIV. There is nothing unfair about this. We got 5 expansions and 8 addon scenarios.

You bring up the sub as justification for it not being fair that we aren't getting anything large scale. Again, that just doesn't make sense. SE is presenting a product to you as is. It is up to you if it is worth the sub or not. If not, cancel. It really is that simple.

- People dislike XIV as loyal XI players

you said, I dont understand why

- proceeds to give tons of info nobody asked for and that is obvious, that clearly shows why an XI player would not like XIV aside from gameplay.

XI was not "long declining" before XIV lol. Previously it was the highest grossing FF game. Youre just talking nonsense at this point. It's easy to understand why some MAY dislike XIV, was my point, especially on a forum for XI. You're just being a sock account like usual.

Ah, the butthurt comes out. Yay.

You said something stupid, I corrected you. That's what happened.

Yes, FFXI was the highest grossing FF game because it was previously the only one that collected monthly sub fees. No ***.

One of these days you'll need to explain to me why you think I'm a sock account. I don't post here often, but my main account is linked clearly. So....is it just salt or?...

I wouldn't say it's so much a matter of design, as it is of actual work being put into any kind of accessibility. I mean, it took what, 15 years to get some sort of in-game support for using one of the game's core mechanics (equipsets)?

Yeah, FFXIV is very respectful of your time in comparison to any MMO I've tried thus far. Whether or not that's a good thing is subjective, but for me who likes to play the game casually, I love it. By design, that's more or less what I meant. The accessibility and being able to log in for short amounts of time and make tangible progress.

FFXI is my main MMO, it's just nice to have a MMO to grind away on coupled with one to play casually.

In that aspect, I actually think that the modern XI is more successful, if anything. This both due to the fact that there barely is any progress to begin with in XIV after finishing the story and because XI has a such a huge space for gear optimization that there's almost always some little thing you can do to improve the job you're playing.

Didn't say anything stupid, only the obvious.. The problem is you take offense if anyone dislikes a game you like. Clearly a forum dedicated to XI, will have more people that like XI than like XIV..

Pretty silly to say XIV isn't/didn't cause a direct decline to XI. First they siphoned off all XIs funds to salvage that disaster 1.0. Then they constantly promoted and put a lot of dedication into improving XIV. Now that its popular and cool with the streamers and tik tokers and what not, its easy to look down on XI and think XIV is some unique and incredible design that resonates to the new kids. The sad part is when XI is long gone and forgotten, they'll think XIV was the best thing ever to Final Fantasy. I roll my eyes every time I see those videos on youtube praising XIV as the best game ever, as it continues with a horrible retention rate. I miss the old days, but yea obviously we know I don't like it and I am spiteful at how SE treated XI since the conception of their idea for XIV.

I try to put myself in the shoes of a brand new player when I try to gauge how accessible a game is. A brand new player in FFXI is far more likely to get lost and frustrated and quit than a new player in FFXIV is. In that regard, FFXIV objectively does a better job at getting new players rolling. I somewhat frequently see new players on the FFXI reddit for example asking for help on what they are supposed to be doing because they're completely lost.

From a gear progression perspective though, yeah I agree with you. FFXI has a lot more depth, but along with that comes a lot more required time investment, which is what I think people like about FFXIV. You get to spend more time just doing content versus grinding away for that +5 str augment. I personally prefer having both sides of the aisle available to me, which is why I think we're pretty fortunate.

My problem with XIV is that there is no reason to do any content as a casual player. If you're not raiding, then you level up your job(s), finish story up to w/e patch is currently out, buy a full set of gear off the AH and you're basically all done until the next story patch comes out. There's no point to run dungeons outside of roulettes, because dungeon drops are always worse than your crafted gear, dungeon tokens also don't matter since the next set of crafted gear is just going to be straight up better in every regard. You don't even need any money, since all crafted stuff sells for peanuts after the first couple of weeks and there's nothing else you can really buy.

This really isn't true. I have a lot of negative things to say about FFXIV. "FFXIV killed FFXI" is not one of them. As I've mentioned several times, FFXI is my main MMO and I've put exponentially more time into FFXI than I have FFXIV.


This implies FFXI was on an upward trend or at least remaining steady prior to FFXIV.


Yeah man, I just don't get how you can take that stance. FFXIV early development started in 2005. We had ToAU(2006), WoTG(2007), 3 add-on scenarios(2009), Abyssea(2010), SoA(2013), Rhapsodies(2015), VR(2022) released during FFXIV's development.

FFXIV brought a ton more eyes to the FF series than FFXI did, that is objectively true.

The only man who's opinion we should care about at SE (Yoshida) is on record saying FFXI is going strong, is still profitable, and will remain online far after development actually stops as a service to the fans.

I really don't know what you were expecting to happen with all of this.

I can't speak too much on that. I basically only care about MSQ and the battle content on FFXIV, I don't dabble in the side stuff. But I have friends that do, and it keeps them engaged for months after patches occur. Housing, crafting, gold saucer, glam hunting, treasure maps, side battle content like Bozjan front, etc. I'm sure there's more and I'm missing some, but like I said I don't dabble in much of that stuff. I hear PvP got a huge face lift in this last patch and is now extremely fun, but I haven't tried it myself.

It's gloriously imbalanced because of the lack of diminishing returns on crowd control. Each time you get hit with a debuff like stun, you don't build resistance like you would in PVE. As such, it's very easy to get CC-locked and just die without being able to do anything. The secret is to move fast and stay out range, only getting close to hit-and-run. Certain jobs, e.g. SMN, WHM, SCH, are also inherently stronger in largescale PVP content (24v24v24) because of their potential to pump out AOE damage.

In that regard, it's not dissimilar from some of my experiences years ago in Diorama. I have very fond memories of a playing a Lv10-cap as SMN and wiping the entire enemy team at the start with Searing Light, then proceeding to quarry constant revitalizers for the remainder of the match. The first time they came back for revenge and got another Searing Light for their pains, the second time I found a large group fighting a number of my teammates, and soon after that they ran when they saw me coming. It was pretty fun burning through prism powders to appear out of nowhere to blast another group, especially while they were animation-locked during /quarry.

Yeah, that's about the gist of what I heard. It's a giant step forward but still has kinks to work out. It's cool they're investing in cleaning up the parts of the game that were less well received. The reworks of the earlier dungeons/trials and PVP rework were awesome steps in the right direction imo.

All entirely irrelevant to progressing your character, unfortunately.

I want an expansion to the far east, new jobs time mage and chemist.

I want that too. I just understand why it won't happen and I can accept it.

Who knows, maybe May 8th will shock us all. Let's hope.

I mean, it's progression, just not battle oriented progression.

Vertical battle progression never did sit right with me. I don't form any kind of attachment to anything on FFXIV gear related that isn't glam related because it gets replaced so quickly. Contrast that with finally getting that 5th piece of Malignance gear from Lilith after soloing her on E 6 million times. Lol

It's really not though. Collecting the 56th swimsuit glamour for your catgirl may be satisfying on some level, but it's hardly progress.

Yeah, you're not wrong I guess.

I've never really been into the side stuff, I can just see how people can find it enjoyable to do in-between the patches, especially if FFXIV is the only MMO you play. If FFXI didn't take up so much of my limited free time, I feel like the side stuff would be fun to do on occasion for me

Nobody knows for sure if FFXI was going to or meant to be developed past the PS2. It was designed for old hardware but so was WoW. It wasn’t until 15 years later that WoW finally made their engine friendly with new hardware.

Yes, FFXI was becoming less popular before FFXIV. FFXIV probably exacerbated it’s decline but not so much in a bad way. It gave FF online fans a new path once they felt they reached a plateau, which we know exists for legit players.

I’d love to see a Legion-esque facelift here but it’s very unlikely in my opinion given the circumstances.

As far as progress in FFXIV, it varies from player to player. Some view progress as beating the cutting edge raids. Some obviously view it as collecting another glam piece. There are people who play exclusively for 1 purpose that isn’t battle related. I know some who exclusively craft. Not my cup of tea but they’re finding enjoyment.

The PS2 stuff is more a story of a developer culture that is immune to change.

They should have been moving their dev kits away from the PS2 era at around the time of the 360 release. They stuck with them for as long as they could, and when they had to change they had no workflow set up.

A gradual phase out would have allowed them to better feel their way around the tooling of PC Development. It does feel like now they're in this half way house, with barely any developers, and barely any will to shift focus.

We also sometimes get a peek behind the curtains with FFXI. You just know there's a jira ticket that's been open for like 5 years about that UI Redesign. It's hard to imagine that wasn't one persons passion project that they hit a wall with.

FFXI is a story of bad development practices. A bold, fun game that is hampered by unmanageable code. New development requires big code changes and you just know there's heaps of magic numbers and inscrutable code there.

Do not worry the FFXIV savior is here to vehemently defend it LUL.

XIV isn't popular because it's a good mmorpg, it's popular because it is the most watered down mmorpg in the history of the genre. It's basically a good mmo game. If you appeal to the mass market it you can make any niche product popular.

You can have the biggest death metal thrash band on the planet if it looks like this

It doesn't matter it's not actually a death metal thrash band if you just say it is anyway, the people who play it will larp it is and jerk off to being "the most popular death metal band ever!".

The key to success is to make something the mass market hates into something they will like by neutering it and continuing to water it down in an ongoing fashion, huge numbers of the people playing modern XIV have never played an momrpg before and will never play one after it. They are not mmorpg players at all.

You know what the target audience for modern XIV actually is? Second life players, the biggest migration of players have been from that game and if you look at those communities you know that. That's why you see all that turbo cringe stuff on twitter related to the game, why they are so fixated with turning the game into a hug box of niceness and why they love buying stuff so much on the cash shop.

XI is made for nerds, XIV is not made for nerds.

That's not to say XIV isn't good, it obviously is. It's just not very good for mmorpg nerds.

but they did do something new tho, you can phase out in VR missions for Battle fields that is new Technology in FFXI outside of resinjima/ Escha nms

No game is really made for nerds. There are nerds in just about every game.

One could say people who play FFXIV exclusively to show off their cat glams and dances are nerds. There are various ways to look at it.


We live in a new world where you can say something and presto, it's so. My favorite are the people on Youtube who have extremely limited knowledge of something or just starting out, calling themselves "Gurus" and "that's just the way it is".