1 million subscribers

[Malithar]

Christ, lets argue for pages over who's priority it is to Google numbers so we can nitpick and argue about other things.

FWIW Alhan, your numbers are just as trashy as anyone's. FFXI a few hundred subscribers per server?

FFXIV has more servers than both games combined and there are easily thousands on each compared to several hundred on the XI servers.

Derp? I'd pick out more but this thread is so silly. CEO used old numbers (anyone's guess as to why), numbers are reported, fan boys argue about validity of numbers provided by CEO, queue multiple pages nit picking over who should have to Google for accurate numbers. Seriously winning there brah.

[Bluestar2kx]

Wow.... I can't believe everyone is still arguing about this, as well as arguing over arguing.

Just wait until the report in April.
Life will go on still whether this is resolved now or not. (And it won't be resolved.)

But we can at least all seem to agree, FFXI is important to SE, of course, it's been printing them money since 2005, so that isn't hard to get.

Just let it go.
(no pun intended)

[Alhanelem]

FWIW Alhan, your numbers are just as trashy as anyone's. FFXI a few hundred subscribers per server?

Quote me? Shiva has ~700 players online right now. I don't recall saying "a few hundred subscribers per server." 700, a number I provided earlier directly from the /sea all command, is more than "a few hundred." So, I don't know where I said that, but I will qualify it to "players online per server," because that's what was actually intended.

fan boys argue about validity of numbers provided by CEO

I'm not a fanboy- but I certainly am looking down the barrel of a hater. How can you call me a fanboy when I'm clearly here posting with a valid subscription and in fact am currently playing this game right now? I'd be kidding myself to think that XI is as big of a player as he is arguing, however. Some simple search commands are all it takes to see the difference.

The numbers I'm questioning aren't the CEO's (although the numbers are out of date now, they were at least at one time accurate)- It's this person's breakdown of those numbers. None of the alleged data he has comes from the exact same time as the CEO's announcement nor do they come directly from him (unless he can prove otherwise). All I'm asking for is proof of these numbers for each game that he is presenting as fact but without evidence. I really don't think that's much to ask, but getting that information out of him is like pulling teeth it seems. The fact that he's so unwilling to prove his own argument is one of the primary reasons I find it quesitonable.

Another random bit info, take it for what you will, is the amount of RMT spamvertisements I see in each game. In XI, I haven't seen one since I resubbed. in XIV I get several each day (including like half a dozen in the last 30 mins or so). If you can glean anything from that, since its the same Special Task Force that combats RMT in both games, it's that the RMT find XIV to be a more lucrative business. If you want proof, I'll be happy to post screenshots of my chatlogs from both games

[Byrth]

100-150k subscribers for FFXI is kind of a large range for a company to have when estimating how many people pay them for a product. It would also indicate there are 6250~9375 accounts per server right now, which requires you to assume almost a 200-350% "dark account" rate of people who are paying for a service they hardly use.

On Lakshmi, a rough current population breakdown gives us:
Total: 699
In Town: 405
In areas surrounding Adoulin: ~100, only 9 people in [U] areas
Bots: 25 (at least - just counting ones I know of in Boyahda Tree and other zones)
Other: ~170, spread throughout the ~280 uncounted areas.

There are always about 500 people left online when the servers go down, so I feel it's actually pretty safe to assume about 400 people are just near-perennially afk. At JP times, we spike up to ~1100 on Lakshmi. Subtracting that same afk population, we get a total of 300+700+400 = 1400. Assuming half of the players log in every other day, we'd be up to ~2000. It still requires a 200% "dark account" rate (people who log in less than every other day) to push you up to even 6000 accounts per server. I'd be amazed if they still had that many absentminded subscribers considering how hard it is to consistently pay them for FFXI.

[FrankReynolds]

And just to be clear here, the odds of any company accepting regular online payments not having an accountant who runs the numbers every single day are slim to none. I guarantee you that they can pull a subscriber count from every service in a matter of minutes. Accounting software has been capable of this sort of thing since the 70s.

[Alhanelem]

And just to be clear here, the odds of any company accepting regular online payments not having an accountant who runs the numbers every single day are slim to none. I guarantee you that they can pull a subscriber count from every service in a matter of minutes. Accounting software has been capable of this sort of thing since the 70s.

Those numbers tend to be kept close to their chests regardless of how good or bad they are. Good, accurate information is not easy to come by because they arent often the ones to provide it (And it's not so much that they give out wrong numbers but more that they aren't given often enough).

[Clou777]

i think ffxi has a total of 100 players across all servers all of which have a buttload of mules on different accounts

[Alhanelem]

i think ffxi has a total of 100 players across all servers all of which have a buttload of mules on different accounts

that's not as big of an exaggeration as we'd like it to be.

[Pixela]

Quote me? Shiva has ~700 players online right now. I don't recall saying "a few hundred subscribers per server." 700, a number I provided earlier directly from the /sea all command, is more than "a few hundred." So, I don't know where I said that, but I will qualify it to "players online per server," because that's what was actually intended.

I'm not a fanboy- but I certainly am looking down the barrel of a hater. How can you call me a fanboy when I'm clearly here posting with a valid subscription and in fact am currently playing this game right now? I'd be kidding myself to think that XI is as big of a player as he is arguing, however. Some simple search commands are all it takes to see the difference.

The numbers I'm questioning aren't the CEO's (although the numbers are out of date now, they were at least at one time accurate)- It's this person's breakdown of those numbers. None of the alleged data he has comes from the exact same time as the CEO's announcement nor do they come directly from him (unless he can prove otherwise). All I'm asking for is proof of these numbers for each game that he is presenting as fact but without evidence. I really don't think that's much to ask, but getting that information out of him is like pulling teeth it seems. The fact that he's so unwilling to prove his own argument is one of the primary reasons I find it quesitonable.

Another random bit info, take it for what you will, is the amount of RMT spamvertisements I see in each game. In XI, I haven't seen one since I resubbed. in XIV I get several each day (including like half a dozen in the last 30 mins or so). If you can glean anything from that, since its the same Special Task Force that combats RMT in both games, it's that the RMT find XIV to be a more lucrative business. If you want proof, I'll be happy to post screenshots of my chatlogs from both games

You are the text book definition of a fanboy, a FFXIV fanboy. Nobody else would of accused me of "baseless attacks" in regards anything I posted, which implies you took it VERY personally. Quite how you think anyone will think you aren't is kinda funny.

Also are you really using the excuse that XIV is a huge success because they let bots, hackers and RMT run rampant? I guess WoW can't be a success then?

In my first post I pointed out that FFXIV probably has more subs than FFXI and DQX combined so quite how that is an attack is beyond me.

As I said, FFXIV probably has around 500k-600k subs (including China now), DQX probably around 300 and FFXI caps it off with around 100k.

Those numbers tend to be kept close to their chests regardless of how good or bad they are. Good, accurate information is not easy to come by because they arent often the ones to provide it (And it's not so much that they give out wrong numbers but more that they aren't given often enough).

So basically you're asserting that the CEO of a company that recently had massive losses and drastic cuts in the share prices (which lead to the last CEO quitting in disgrace) would give a speech to shareholders and the press knowingly (even though it would be incredibly easy to get upto date numbers) giving old figures (which you and others presume are much lower) just to keep them secret? As poor as many of the business decisions Square make I don't think even they would be that backward.

There are very few reasons any competent CEO would use figures this old, I can think of a few though.

100-150k subscribers for FFXI is kind of a large range for a company to have when estimating how many people pay them for a product. It would also indicate there are 6250~9375 accounts per server right now, which requires you to assume almost a 200-350% "dark account" rate of people who are paying for a service they hardly use.

On Lakshmi, a rough current population breakdown gives us:
Total: 699
In Town: 405
In areas surrounding Adoulin: ~100, only 9 people in [U] areas
Bots: 25 (at least - just counting ones I know of in Boyahda Tree and other zones)
Other: ~170, spread throughout the ~280 uncounted areas.

There are always about 500 people left online when the servers go down, so I feel it's actually pretty safe to assume about 400 people are just near-perennially afk. At JP times, we spike up to ~1100 on Lakshmi. Subtracting that same afk population, we get a total of 300+700+400 = 1400. Assuming half of the players log in every other day, we'd be up to ~2000. It still requires a 200% "dark account" rate (people who log in less than every other day) to push you up to even 6000 accounts per server. I'd be amazed if they still had that many absentminded subscribers considering how hard it is to consistently pay them for FFXI.

I think it's honestly a bit much to assume that 400 players AFK almost 24/7. That's a large number of players that would leave their computer on all day and night for no real reason isn't it? I can accept that many would goto work and leave it on to bazaar items but even then, 400 people (x16 servers) that would leave their computes on 24/7 is a bit of an over-estimation in my eyes. You also didn't count EU and just NA and JP and didn't take into account that Lakshimi is on the lower end of the population charts.

As I said, it's within reason to assume that FFXI still has 100k subscribers. That's an average of 6k overall subs per server, which given dark subs and difficulty in actually finding out how many do play regularly isn't out of the question.

[Kawar]

Square made an announcement a few days ago that FFXI, FFXIV and Dragonquest 3 combined have 1 million subscribers.

How many do you think each title has? My guess is 300k for D3, FFXI 100-200k and FFXIV about 550k

The way i look at it i do not mind as long as ffxi stays online.