I was initially worried about the thought of XIV totally killing off XI but after thinking about it a bit more, I don't think it'll happen. At first anyway.
Anyone who's played a new MMO at launch knows that they face one major glaring problem - lack of content. Not their fault, of course, since they can't release
everything at first otherwise there'll be nothing to release in the future. Now considering that most of the players will be coming over from XI, I think this will hurt XIV more than it would a new, nameless MMO.
If there's one thing about FFXI, is that it's chock-full of hardcore gamers. We're absolutely insane. People level the new jobs to 75 in a week, we beat ACP in like 6 hours, we grind our asses off to get a stupid blue old man's hat. Granted, we all don't do this but most of us are pretty serious.
We want endgame, we want the cool uber armor that comes with it, we don't want to start off with a level cap again (
I'm sure the system will be different but you know what I mean). Bottom line:
We want content and a new MMO will most likely not be able to give us that content right off the bat. For instance, I played LOTRO for a bit when it was released and it was a fantastic game but at the same time was really disappointing since only a small part of Middle Earth was released at the time. No Gondor, Rohan, Lothlorien, Moria, Mordor, Isengard etc etc. We of course won't know which parts of the world are yet to be released but we
do know that there will be a lot missing.
I'm sure it'll be exciting to explore a whole new world but just how much will there be to explore and how much satisfaction will we get from it? I dunno but I'm secretly hoping to be pleasantly surprised.