Bushido wrote:
It was on his list but that was three years ago
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7759Two years three months, and to his credit some of that stuff has happened.
Meanwhile if you were playing on kupo at the time of that post your server has changed ownership twice (your characters up in the air both times).
When I look at
https://na.nasomi.com/status/age.php I see something interesting. There are 216 people online that started two years ago, 114 that started one year ago, and 109 that started within the last year. There are twice as many level 75's as non 75s (discounting mules). If one believes that the declining population stems from a lack of content for level 75's, why is the strong majority of the playerbase on the server playing level 75 content? The 109 people who started this year cannot possibly be maxed on content, why are there so few of them?
Personally, I believe the server has a much bigger problem than the content problem. I believe the server has an optics problem.
What does a new player think about when choosing a private server?
1) How well does it work, are there bugs? (I believe Eden and Nasomi to be roughly equal in this regard)
2) How good is the technical support if things do glitch? (I believe this is a win for Eden)
3) How much like retail does it function? (I believe Eden and Nasomi to be roughly equal in this regard though Eden brands themselves better)
4) Are there enough players leveling to easily find a party? (~55% Nasomi online chars level 75 vs 25% Eden 75s plus a larger overall population, Eden wins).
5) Do I have friends that play there? (out of a server's control, but a derivative of overall population, which at the moment is a win for Eden).
6) How much does it cost? (Both tie as free servers)
Things that they think about after they've been playing for awhile.
1) How much content does the sever have, am I going to run out of things to do? (In my view the two servers are equal on their path to fully working jobs+content, though Eden appears to be moving faster at the moment)
2) What's the level of GM corruption/playerbase exploitation (I believe this is a win for Nasomi).
Things that they think about after they've invested serious time:
1) How stable is the server long term? (This is a big win for Nasomi, but it doesn't come into play until later)
Coupled with the "I'm not starting over" factor, I think this more or less explains why Nasomi is retaining level 75's while Eden is growing much faster. If all tiers of znm including PW were released fully coded tomorrow, that would obviously be a good thing for the existing 75's, and could even bring fifty to a hundred people out of retirement for a few months. I don't think it would do much to change the overall picture of population numbers or the optics for a new person starting here instead of Eden.
On the other hand, if the server:
1) Had a better support system without compromising on GM corruption (tricky)
2) Yanked all out of era items and custom code to beat Eden on era accuracy. (Nasomi has custom choices that make it non-retail, Eden has QOL, but a mog wardrobe is an easier sell to a prospective player who cares about era accuracy than white coney.)
3) Flesh out the aspects of the game a player encounters in their first thirty days. Why are there Christmas tree decorations up year round? Why does the weather change like the flick of a switch instead of fading? Why do starter mobs yield 100 exp? Why are there so many half baked quests and uncrafted af/mission/maat fights? If you check Eden's patch notes, they do a great job at this sort of thing.
Nasomi server can't afford to play the "only game in town" card to avoid this kind of detail work/lack of player support anymore.
All of this said, knowing what I know from many years on and around the private server scene, I would still start on Nasomi if I were choosing a place to start from scratch. If I didn't know better though, I'd start on Eden. Their selling points on the ffxi private servers discord and reddit would totally win me over; it wouldn't be till later when their server rolled over to its fourth owner perhaps, or I saw the drawbacks of active players with GMs, that I would start to question my decision to play there.
That's my take on things. I'm not an idiot, I know content is important too; I'm just trying to bring things to the surface that I think are equally important, especially to the optics for a starting player.