MMO’s with no end-game aren’t a new thing, either.
I remember when City of Heroes came out (which was pre-WoW), I was the 2nd person in the world to hit max level (the dude I was grouping with was first). A week later, we got together with all the other max level players and beat Hamadon, which was the only ‘raid’ encounter.
And there was simply nothing else to do in the game after that.
A lack of compelling race/species options. every single game has humans. its over done. all the surviving mmo’s have unique and compelling options. 
but really, its hard for an mmo to drop 15 years worth of lore and content all at once. FF14 is FF 14
there is years worth of lore behind it, it has a fan base to sustain it.
what is the lore/ story that supports New world?
boats? island?
people don’t pick up a game because they want to grind away years off their life. they want something they can invest in. an mmo is sort of that living world. a RP area even if you dont rp directly. you could min max and still be in that RPG mind set. gaming they system or what have you.
in other games, its that game mode that draws players.
in wow, its a theme park mmo. there is a lot of different games to play within the game and all of the park activities contributes to your character progression. be that player power. Cosmetic. symbolic (achievements). or a collection or exploration.
wow also provides a social stage where players can interact on a social level without needing to deal with the normal barriers that limit that social interaction.
people like time to be alone and time to group up. wow and im sure FF14 both are able to provide game play for both scenarios.
other games try and fail to do both and eliminate those settings because they lack the established player structure to support it. like solo dungeons because your game doesn’t have enough people doing dungeons. well gg the social aspect is dead because the solo players dont have their dash of social interaction.
its like introverts. “we” may like to not interact with people much of the time. off doing our own thing but “we” are usually not trying to live on a deserted island with no one else on it. the social interaction is still needed from time to time.
so, yeah, most mmo’s will die out because the social networks within them are external ones and not ones that the game supports natively. once the early network breaks down. people going back to other games or not continuing to play, the rest of the network has less reason to play.
wow would be dead and burried by now if it didn’t have the group content.
if i wasn’t joining rbg groups with discord chats, i prob would have stopped logging in on just the game content alone. (such a grind, until recently.)
the looser grind feels a lot better because you can get a main to a point where they feel like they are in a good spot. Alts are good to start working on because you are not loosing time that should be spent on the main.
Alts don’t feel like a waste of time because they can catch up to a reasonable place to be competitive.
the raid loggers prob only raid log as it is because they get to chat with their groups and do something together.
Same could be said for RBGs or consistent M+ groups
New world has its own issues though which are fundamentally broken. the game is basically an Alpha/ Beta with the holes in places that shouldn’t have holes.
and even if that wasn’t there, i dont see what the long term goal it has to keep players invested.
also, don’t reward players for nothing. logging in isn’t really something to be rewarded by. especially if you give loot that takes up bag slots and bag slots are limited. the only way to manage bags then is to not log in until you feel like playing a bag space manager and there are better games that have that as a “feature”
Yeah they didn’t know what they were doing, but to be fair, it was their experimentation into making FF series into an MMORPG. Yoshi-P even said himself he played WoW as one game to get a good idea of how to make FF14 succeed and to see how 1.0 went wrong.
Seems all a company needs to do to start their own first successful MMO is to simply play other mmos and see what people like/dislike about certain things. That’s not what Amazon did. They put the basic things into New World(questing, PVP objectives, rep, factions, etc) but didn’t play anything else. They haven’t realized mob density sucks because almost everything is a reskin of something else with the same pattern of attacks. Every town is the same town designed and turned somehow to make it look different…etc.
Hello, I see you posted in the thread. You must be awfully confused because you can not buy currency on the Final Fantasy 14 store! You must be confused with World of Warcraft!
Thanks for your post and have a great day!
Yea so basically what I said then right? Same issue with star wars. They didn’t have much end game at launch.
New World had a lot of hype so naturally every streamer was going to jump on the bandwagon to try and get as many viewers as they could. Then the interest dies out and they move on. Too much hype is just as bad as not having hype at all if the game doesn’t meet the expectations of the hype. FF14 had the same thing happen where it got 2 months of interest and dropped sharply after.
So it’s significantly harder for a game like New World that just launched to ever rise above the population it had at launch. FF14 is one of the few exceptions where it’s grown year-to-year and WoW won’t ever get 10 million subscribers again, but will still be highly profitable.
Most video games in real life have a very short lifespan. The majority of MMORPGs died out within their first year. Think about how many games you’ve bought, played for 8-40 hours, and never played again. It’s probably in the dozens.