The slow death of FFXI (to me)

No, this has nothing to do with why "FFXI is dying" or whether the game will still be around in a few months. This is, however, about how FFXI is dying for me specifically and how I'm finding less and less reasons to keep my subscription going.

Let's see... why would people play MMOs in the first place

1. To have fun in the game content
2. To get stuff from events
3. To have fun with friends

Game content

I'd say FFXI has hard, long and slow game content. Finishing a storyline is quite a challenge, and the fact that there are people who have been playing the game who have not seen the ends of the Zilart or CoP storylines shows how hard it is to actually "play" the game. I think we... suffer through it? Torture ourselves to gather people and get through fights with crazy requirements?

Additionally, FFXI content comes out at a surprisingly slow pace. I understand the need to keep dragging the game along in order to keep the subscriptions going, but shouldn't they do this by releasing further content instead? There are enough timesinks in the "endgame" events already. WoTG was released over a year ago, but the developers themselves have admitted that even after a full year, they still have not released half of the content. How long before we can get the full story? 2+ years at $12.95/month is a lot of money just to see the end of story.

Finally, the recently announced "mini-expansions" just sounds like an attempt to capitalize on their player base. Full expansions typically add new areas to visit, new things to do, but these three expansions currently sound like... long questlines that they are charging you for. What's next? Charging $2.50 to get armor for your chocobo?

Events

So, one thing that was keeping me playing FFXI was the various events that we could do, have some fun in and get some rewards. Let's see what's happened to the various events:

• Einherjar - Cancelled - Low turnout
• Nyzul Isle - Cancelled - No healer
• MMM - Cancelled - No interest
• Limbus - Cancelled about half the time - Low turnout. Questionable if we can tackle Omega
• ZNMs - Still on, but questionable if we can tackle Tier IV
• Dynamis - Only event that is consistently on. However, I can only make Saturday runs

So, in the space of 2 weeks, I went from having 6 regular events to 1 solid event, and 2 events that are questionable. Of these events, I'm not certain Limbus will continue much longer, which leaves me with two events that only take place once a week for me...

Hmm... $12.95 for essentially 8 time-consuming events with really low drop rates? ZNMs have a nice record of 0 drops of the Hachiryu armor that many people want even after we've done it for months. And people know what Dynamis drop rates are better than I do.

Friends

This is a sore point for me... when Aqqy went over to WoW, I went over initially to take a look around and to play with her some more. I came back to FFXI not long after that when I realized that I couldn't play both games at once and there were more people on FFXI.

Then the bannings came and took out about 1/3 of AP. Even those who were temp banned decided not to continue playing. Those of us who were had no part in the banning lost our interest and motivation in the game. Some people even cancelled their FFXI subscriptions in disgust over SE's attitude, leaving even less of my friends around. Linkshell exp parties, which used to be common a few weeks ago, haven't been formed in ages. These days I'd be lucky to see a handful of people on AP at any time.

Last night, I logged into FFXI just to see what was going on. Pretty much no dialog for the entire night until Wu sent me a /tell asking if I'd come help with KS99 (which also got cancelled last night due to a lack of people). Conversely, #alphaprime on WoW has more people, more chatter compared to FFXI.

Right now, I think I can count on one hand the number of AP people who are still playing FFXI like they used to... everyone else has either lost all motivation to play, or is over on WoW.

So, what does this mean?

I'm pretty sad at this turn of events. Two weeks ago, we were having fun, making plans to level more jobs, schedule more events and help people with missions. Today, FFXI is a ghost town for me, with only a select few individuals who I still talk to. I'll still keep coming to what few events I have left, but I'm really losing motivation to login at all.

At tne end of Feb, I'll take another look to see if I'll still continue the subscription. I've let a few people know what my criteria for keeping my FFXI account active, so we'll have to see if these criteria are met. Suffice to say, the points above tie in closely to my thinking.

As for WoW, I still have about week left in my "Scroll of Resurrection" 10-day trial period. I'll probably pick up at least another couple of months since Ghiren purchased the game under my reference and the two of us have 3x exp for the next 90 days. Whether I'll continue the subscription after that would depend... at least in WoW you can easily shut your account off without worrying about being deleted :P

PS: I deleted all my polls after I found out that someone was stuffing the ballots :P