Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums > Final Fantasy: The Quickening > Final Fantasy XI Online > Is FFXI still alive and well?

[Flying Mullet]

I was curious how FFXI has been holding up since WoW has been out for a while now. Is the active population still the same? Was there a dip in the active population when WoW came out and now it's coming back up? Or perhaps it's been in a steady decline or it dipped and then stayed consistent.

[Miriel]

I think it's pretty much been a steady decline. That's just what I think though. There's still plenty of people playing the game though. Thousands of players per server and many many servers.

I do think WoW affected the player population as I know people DID leave FFXI for WoW. But I think the biggest thing is just the fact that this is an old game. It's constantly being updated, but I can see way people would just want to call it quits once they'd been playing for multiple years and completed a lot of what they'd set out to do.

[Mirage]

The decline isn't rapid in either case. I'm expecting the game to be profitable for S-E for many years to come.

[Omecle]

I think the main thing that affects people these days is S-E's extremely poor customer service.

With that said, there are still plenty of people playing. I believe FFXI is ranked the 4th top MMO and has a combined population of Everquest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online -- I think it was around 700k-1M. Although there are some servers that don't have as many players, and the population used to be a lot larger.

In any case, the game ain't dying.

[Bahamut2000X]

I'll predict it dying soon after SE's new MMO is released. It's apparent that SE isn't focusing on FFXI as much as they used to. It took them like 4-5 months (as opposed to use getting update like every 2 months) to get us a real update since the expansion came out, and half of it was bugged, and the other half was like 3 new zones and a bit of new game features. But over all nothing big.

I think they only had maybe 1 or 2 updates since then. But then again I haven't been on or keeping up as much since my computer that could run it died a while ago. =/

[Citizen Bleys]

It's alive and well. I play every time I have a day off and there are always lots of people on.

[Del Murder]

Updates with tons of new things to do are still being produced regularly.

[oddler]

I think I'll end up coming back pretty soon. I'll be letting go of something else to make time, though.

Everytime I've ever played, it's always been hopping. In general, yeah, I think it's become a little less populated but as far as I can tell, there's no shortage of people playing and still new players starting (or old players restarting).