What kind of slide did the site take? Please fill me in on the history of this place if you can?
That's... complicated, lol.
The site has gone through periods of overmoderation that actually, at one point, caused people to make a competing site in retaliation, but that was back in the old days, and most of those folks ultimately came back.
The two big events that impacted readership were the server merger between Quetzalcoatl and Midgard, and the shift from a server-specific FFXI board, to a generalist FFXIV board.
The server merge diluted the importance of QCDN.org, since most of the Midgard folks had no particular interest in using the site, and having half the server
not use it meant that it lost a good deal of its significance. Used to be that the site was probably the best way to keep up on what was happening on the server, but that became less the case.
The
big change came when the folks in charge decided to try and grab a bigger XIV audience than they should have, to be totally frank. If they'd decided to simply pick a server, encourage all the old Quetzys who were going to give XIV a try to go there, and named the site appropriately, they'd probably have seen greater success than they did effectively trying to compete with FFXIAH and/or the official forums. Too broad an approach yielded inadequate results.
That and the fact that XIV was one of the worst MMO launches of the past decade, of course.
