Originally Posted by 'Bigfish',index.php?page=Thread&postID=213511#post 213511
I have no hope for FFXIV. Maybe I'm just contrary to the whole process, but I don't see SE learning THAT much from XI. My take on the market is thus:
At this point WoW is the undisputed king, and through cunning trivialization of their early game content, they more or less ensure every new player can hit cap with a fair degree of ease. It is actually moderately intriguing the amount of obsolete content they have in the game. But that is beside the point from the fact that they keep their end game content relatively fresh. With a small investment of time, you can be hob-nobbing it around with all the other level 80s.
Other MMOs are able to more or less maintain their subscription base through sheer force of addiction, but you just don't see anyone really starting anything but WoW because every other MMO more or less retains the notion that you have to spend as much time getting to cap and gearing up as the people who started half a decade ago, which is a real turn off.
FFXIV will almost certainly get a good start, but I imagine its going to go down the same path of all the things that turned people off XI: Limited UI, PS2(3) limitations, a lack of empathy with the fan base, and an inability to implement forward looking design to make the game that people want to play instead of copying the big dog MMO of the time.
That's just my 2 cents though.