[Rothy]

Originally Posted by Malacite

FFXIV or Star Wars The Old Republic

That's where my money is going.

[Tickmeoff]

Originally Posted by Malacite

Hmm, last I checked FFXI still held the #2 spot behind WoW.

Runescape and both Lineage games would like a word with you.

[Feba]

It depends on how you count them up. If you're counting subscription based games I think it's correct, especially if you only count American subscriptions. But that's being awfully subversive about the fact that FFXI is a huge game, but just isn't the biggest.



America accounts for the majority of military spending worldwide, but that doesn't make Israel's army any less impressive. And America's military isn't any better because it spends more. It just does. Or like with computer OS; Windows is inarguably the king, but OS X, BSD, Linux, and others all have quite a few users too (both professionally and domestically).

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

The MMORPG cycle:

You leave your old MMO.
You start playing a shiny new one.
You think the shiny new MMO is better and more awesome than your old MMO.
Then the shinyness fades.
The nerfing begins.
Job Class wars ensure with poor newbies caught in the crossfire.
If a franchised MMO, roleplay and exploration are eventually forsaken and even frowned upon.
DPS eventually becomes all that matters.
Fun is cast aside for efficiency.
Endgame becomes "the point" of playing, rather than having adventures with friends.
Every trip to any related forum starts to contain nine tons of bitching and how the developer "fails."
The fun is sucked out and...

You find a shiny new MMO to play.

[Empedocles]

Originally Posted by Malacite

Hmm, last I checked FFXI still held the #2 spot behind WoW. But then WoW skews things insanely by having over 11 million subscribers.

Going from this, the chart and the announcement from SquareEnix a long time back saying they have over 1.5million accounts, my guess (without going through the sources) is that this is a US-based chart and doesn't take into consideration other countries... WoW has a larger Australia base, while FFXI has a much larger Japanese base and Europe is unknown to me, but going from my experiences with both games I'd say there's more Europeans playing FFXI than WoW.

Oh, that and according to the chart, FFXI is ~4% of WoW. 1.5 is not 4% of 11.

Unless my math is a lot crappier than I thought.

[Feba]

I took FFXI to be 500-600k accounts, and then multiplied that by 26 to get WoW's figure; it seemed roughly accurate to the figures I've seen previously.

[Balfree]

If were gonna go with charts/ratings/whatever, FFXI has a higher score than WoW on MMORPG.com.

Quality over quantity I suppose?

[Verranicus]

It looks alright. Kind of a bastard child of WoW, Lineage 2 and Guild Wars.

Pretty sure the end result will be the same as every other new MMO, though. Everyone harps about how rgeat it is/will be, they get a huge turnout the first month and then people start trickling back to their old games.

But hey, I'm still gonna try it if I have the money.

[nanatsu]

Originally Posted by Empedocles

Going from this, the chart and the announcement from SquareEnix a long time back saying they have over 1.5million accounts, my guess (without going through the sources) is that this is a US-based chart and doesn't take into consideration other countries... WoW has a larger Australia base, while FFXI has a much larger Japanese base and Europe is unknown to me, but going from my experiences with both games I'd say there's more Europeans playing FFXI than WoW.

Oh, that and according to the chart, FFXI is ~4% of WoW. 1.5 is not 4% of 11.

Unless my math is a lot crappier than I thought.

Latest press release from SE puts FFXI at around 500K users. They have about 2 million active characters, but that doesn't equal the number of users since most people have more than one character that they log into on a regular basis. I myself have 6. That chart is about as accurate as you can get if you're not a professional marketing organization like NDS and all the references to the numbers are there if you want to look. Even if you take into account that some time has passed since the press releases and the numbers may not be completely accurate, they give a ballpark figure that is probably fairly close to how it's supposed to be.

Now I don't want anyone to take me for a WoW fanboy. I couldn't be further from that. But there's no reason to overestimate FFXI's place in the mmo space. It's a great game, but doesn't cater to the common denominator, doesn't have up-to-date graphics, cites PS2 limitations, and has shoddy marketing which results in not attracting a lot of new players. Of course it's not going to have the numbers you would like and of course games like Aion which start out with a strong Korean user base is gonna outpace it, if only in the beginning. The reception and reviews for Aion so far have been pretty good. That doesn't take away from FFXI's quality as a game, but neither should you underestimate Aion's appeal or WoW's stranglehold on the genre. Having said that, I'm really not all that interested in Aion either, but I can still recognize its strengths and appeal to the mainstream user base.

[Malacite]

FFXI only has 500k accounts. You were thinking of how many active players the game has, which is 2 million roughly according to SE's post on the official site a little while back.

WoW on the other hand does have literally 11 million accounts. Nothing, and I mean nothing is touching that. All the new MMOs coming out like FF14 and Star Wars are going to put a dent in that for sure, but I just don't see them actually rivaling WoW. It's kind of funny actually because when FFXI came out it was expected to dominate the market. Then the harsh reality of the game set in and drove people away.

[Kaziel0]

Originally Posted by Malacite

It's kind of funny actually because when FFXI came out it was expected to dominate the market. Then the harsh reality of the game set in and drove people away.

Thing was, when FFXI came out here in the states, it wasn't that far from other MMOs in terms of being party-oriented or stuff like the NMs. It was pretty much par for the course, with the missions and quests being real story-telling devices instead of just repeatable things which made you pocket change. No one realized that it was super hard, since the other options were pretty much just as hard...

Unfortunately, approximately one year after the release of FFXI in the U.S., WoW hit the market and finalized a paradigm shift which had been in the works in other MMOs (e.g. CoHs using instanced zones and quests that gave XP), and put all these changes together into a polished package. If you want to look at it this way, FFXI was the last (and arguably best) of the old design, but the old design doesn't mesh well with a generally casual playstyle (wanting to hop on for an hour or two, a few times a week), thus is not the most successful business model.

[Omniblast]

I do like some of their armor sets from Aion. They look pretty!

Items you will probably never get ingame >.< - AionSource.com

Also, they glow, I've always wanted weapons to glow in FFXI but nothing like that ever occured, nor when you enflamed the weapon or use any of the en spells, they should have made some effect hover over your weapon or something like that. Oh well.

Robes and dresses are pretty crazy in game. Everything that is loose type of material (cloth) flows and weaves when your spell casting and when your generally moving about.

I don't like the male "robe" as much, since they make them look like their dudes in dresses from the back, otherwise everything else is kinda cool.

All weapons have a active stance and a non-active stance. Active stance does something different with every weapon, those weapons in particular are higher level ones, and I havn't seent them in beta yet.

This game runs strictly on money (Kinah). I mean seriously, everytime you die you lose some base xp, and you can recover that by paying the Soul Soother (or someone like that I forgot what they are called.) Travel costs Kinah, either by flight path or teleportation. I do like the teleportation effects, the guy opens a portal in front of you and you jump through.
Items and weapons drop a lot, their "gobbie bag" is a cube, that has multiple slots, and you can expand your cube.

But like everyone says, it really depends on the story. As a Daeva that loses your memories in the beginning then you have to rise up in ranks again it's kinda odd when you think you recovered your memories already. (I would think I would have the same rank as I left.)

[Balfree]

Glowing things? Seriously? I absolutely loathe that!

[IfritnoItazura]

Originally Posted by Malacite

FFXI only has 500k accounts. You were thinking of how many active players the game has, which is 2 million roughly according to SE's post on the official site a little while back.

No, he meant characters, not "active players". It'd be weird if a FFXI has more active players than accounts.

SE reported recently that FFXI had 2.35 million characters (on presumably active accounts). My very rough estimate places active accounts at 661,600 to 775,400. Since a small number of players have multiple accounts, the number of active players should be just a bit under that.

[DakAttack]

Originally Posted by Malacite

FFXI only has 500k accounts. You were thinking of how many active players the game has, which is 2 million roughly according to SE's post on the official site a little while back.

WoW on the other hand does have literally 11 million accounts. Nothing, and I mean nothing is touching that. All the new MMOs coming out like FF14 and Star Wars are going to put a dent in that for sure, but I just don't see them actually rivaling WoW. It's kind of funny actually because when FFXI came out it was expected to dominate the market. Then the harsh reality of the game set in and drove people away.

How can the amount of active players exceed the amount of accounts? Each player must have their own account, and it's impossible to count multiple players for any single account., that's guessing.

An account is simply a record for any number of players, but can't be considered one for multiple players because it has multiple characters. Accounts can either be active, or inactive, and if WoW has eleven million accounts that doesn't mean it has anywhere near that amount of active, subscribing customers. It can mean any number of things, besides the obvious, which is lolgoldfarmers.

I doubt SE is going to aim for the LCD, as Blizzard has, with FFXIV, but they're definitely opening up more opportunities for more players. We've entered the prime time for ANYBODY to capitalize on the unrest growing within the WoW playerbase, and who better to do it than SE? I doubt any other company has the recognition and following SE does.