so, since you feel ripped off, what else could you do for potentially 24 hours a day for less than (I assumes thats Euros) 0.5 Euros a day? honest question. what else could you do? couldnt sit in a cafe thats for sure. you could go for walks in a park, but then wear and tear on clothing and shoes is likely more than that. I mean I AM assuming you wear shoes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Heavenchild
as for teh thread topic, I occasionally see the same people when we are doing roulettes. typically its likely we are doing the same thing at the same time and just get in to the same ones. if you log in at the same time daily, and run the same process, you will be always more likely to run into people who are doing the same thing. its not rocket science. the smaller the server pop, the more likely that is.
Seeing the same people in roulettes
Printable View
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07-12-2023, 11:04 PMKes13a
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07-12-2023, 11:07 PMAvoidy
I got the same guy 2 roulettes in a row the other day lol. I didn't think much of it since it was like 2 am though.
Like it or not, the simple truth is this game's always gone on a downward population trend like this, where for one month there'll be a sharp player increase followed by 4-5 months of the player count decreasing until the next patch. People here hate steamcharts being mentioned but I think using them to observe basic trends is fine really. It just shows what's obvious to anyone who's honest: that all we do for months is lose people, and then we get a few of them back for a new patch, and then we lose more people, with the pattern operating at (generally) a net loss until the new expansion comes out. Then we get a surge of returning people who check out the new patch, followed by a slow decline once more when they mostly quit. Personally? I really can't stand it. I think with even an ounce of effort between content lulls, we could at least stop losing more people than we gain, since XIV has a lot of cool stuff in it that the devs don't even bother trying to incentivize. But that ship has sailed, so there it is. Most people I know play this game seasonally and the head dev encourages it, so nobody should treat FFXIV like their main mmo. It feels more like a hub game with brief multiplayer elements than an actual thriving open world mmo game.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...3804/image.png -
07-12-2023, 11:14 PMCatwho
A lot of people took the summer or this patch specifically "off" because of the spate of absolute banger games they'd rather be playing.
Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4, FFXVI - between those and summer vacations, tons of folks took a break for a month or two. People with houses may not have cancelled their subs, but they stripped their play time down to the bare bones. For the last three weeks, I literally only logged in for raid night and to cap tomes in expert roulettes.
I was wondering if we might get an influx of people from XVI now that most folks are wrapping up their first play throughs and are hungry for more game that doesn't actually exist, but that doesn't appear to have been the case. -
07-13-2023, 12:34 PMTheDecayBecause FFXVI is disappointing, and it certainly will not entice people to play FF14, which has even more getting-airship-components-for-Mid-type filler.Quote:
Originally Posted by Catwho
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07-13-2023, 01:20 PMStriker44I'd just amend this part to say their primary or only game. For example, FFXIV is my main MMO right now (actually, the only MMO I'm still playing), but I cycle quite equally between it, Destiny 2, Nier: Replicant, and a variety of older games (currently fan-made maps for Warcraft 2). Any game that becomes far and away your "main" game will feel stale eventually...MMO's by their nature have much more content than single-player titles, but the feeling will sink in eventually.Quote:
Originally Posted by Avoidy
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07-13-2023, 01:59 PMVelKallorYet, Titanmen, I see new players every single day.Quote:
Because FFXVI is disappointing, and it certainly will not entice people to play FF14, which has even more getting-airship-components-for-Mid-type filler.
Funny, that. -
07-13-2023, 02:26 PMKatish
I'm curious what a more direct competitor will do to FFXIV? Blue Protocol was delayed till next year where it will be competing against 7.0 for my time. If 7.0 continues these lulls I think I'll keep to BP for an indeterminate amount of time. BP was really successful in JP and I've been on the waiting train to play it.
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07-13-2023, 03:19 PMZanarkand-RonsoOther Videogames Exist.Quote:
Originally Posted by Catwho
If your doing nothing but just playing FFXIV, then you will miss out on other Videogames.
Its good to play more then one videogame. -
07-13-2023, 04:05 PMBRVVDo you have proof those started because of FFXVI?Quote:
Originally Posted by VelKallor
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07-13-2023, 04:07 PMVelKallorMy point is that one has zero to do with the other.Quote:
Because FFXVI is disappointing, and it certainly will not entice people to play FF14, which has even more getting-airship-components-for-Mid-type filler.
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07-13-2023, 04:12 PMBRVVSo you didn't refuse the claim that FFXVI drives no one to FFXIV, not adding anything to the discourse. Thanks for confirmation.Quote:
Originally Posted by VelKallor
I also see new people around. There are like 1/40th of people around the cities compared to EWs launch hype. BUT: a lot of the people around are sprouts - of course since those still have a lot to play ;) -
07-13-2023, 06:03 PMHeavenchildIt's easy. For over 300€ I could play a ton of other games (for example from all the steam sales) with tons of real content. Meanwhile FFXIV doesn't deliver much longlasting for a while now. I really can't understand why and how so many people want to defend what SE does.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kes13a
I see people go. My friendlist is almost full but almost nobody is online, because they are bored from 'nothing to do'. I can't even do ranked pvp because it's hard to get matches, no matter what time.
But many people pretend like everything is fine and the solution of the problems of FFXIV would just be to 'go play these other games'. xD
I don't play 24/7. You know, I go out and touch grass. But seriously, I can do a lot that costs almost nothing. : 3
But at the same time I can speak about the problems my favourite game has developed. Because I care about it. That's all.
Today they announced 6.45. I am looking forward to it. :) -
07-13-2023, 06:03 PMReap00I've begun seeing terrible trolling threads by the same author. I look at different threads. I see the same guy. This never happened before Endwalker.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDecay
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07-13-2023, 09:08 PMVelKallorhttps://media.tenor.com/7gw0yQXn60oAAAAC/so-true.gifQuote:
Originally Posted by Reap00
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07-13-2023, 09:56 PMAtelier-BagurThe perfect thread reply doesn't exi-Quote:
Originally Posted by Reap00
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07-17-2023, 03:39 AMLukaRoselia
Dead game bro. But seriously, content patches are horrendously slow now so its no secret there aren't a lot of people playing.
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07-17-2023, 03:56 AMAtelier-BagurWoW is dead, ESO is dead, GW2 is dead, Lost Ark is having numerous emergency streams is dead, New World is dead.Quote:
Originally Posted by LukaRoselia
Man I think MMOs are just dead in general. Time to find a better genre to invest our time in. -
07-17-2023, 05:13 AMIkaraGreydancerYou clearly missed what this person said and it's obvious you're grasping at straws.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDecay
Answer me this. For a game so disappointing as you claim why do reviews sit in the high 80s to low 90s range? You can't pull the "oh look bad faith Ikara back at it again" card here cause we have data. So please explain.
Also there's a concept of people doing things around the same time. There's a concept of you being on a less populated server so you'll see folks more often (if you really aren't an alt). There's also the concept of you trying like hell to sell your opinion that EW (and by extension CBU3) is garbo and the game is on Death Row...despite paying for said game.
What's next? "Look guys Fan Fest didn't have 10 million people there, game is clearly dying". -
07-17-2023, 06:42 AMRenathrasThis is nonsense.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDecay
Even as far back as SB I'd often cycle through my ques and see the same people multiple times. It was pretty frequent in ShB when doing my 4x Normal Trials for the week (implying others were also quing up for them). Turns out, if you get out of an instance at the same time and que for the next one at the same time, you get matched together.
OMG!
How unexpected and surprising! The game must surely be dying!
Oh, wait, no. That other thing. Something that makes perfect sense and is completely expected in a healthy game.
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Also "means only one thing": False dichotomy fallacy...without even the "di-".
It could mean quite a few things.
It could mean you were playing during non-peak times.
It could mean a bunch of people were quing as a group and you were the first person in que after completing the last dungeon.
It could mean nothing more than you being a random that got thrown in with them (random chance: exists).
It could mean people have all the tomes and gear they need and so are doing other content (BLU runs, static raids, Island Sanctuary, Eureka/Bozja, etc etc).
It could mean a lot of things other than "players are no longer actually playing the game". -
07-17-2023, 06:46 AMRenaltHis "where is the money going?" thread was nuked. Might not see that one for 10 days or at all. They will make a new persona though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Reap00
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07-17-2023, 06:54 AMKes13adarn, I missed the event because I was sleeping. does a ringing sound happen to signify when a troll gets their wings?Quote:
Originally Posted by Renalt
people must have read their signature and reported a bad faith poster -
07-17-2023, 07:38 AMRenathrasQuote:
Originally Posted by Heavenchild
I don't pay for a single retainer.
I have everything I need.
What on God's green earth are you doing where you NEED additional retainers? You only need them if you're trying to dominate the Market Board, and not even for that, or are an even worse packrat than I am, which would be truly impressive. I have an almost always full Armory Chest, close to 800 items in my Glamour Chest, stuff everything into the Armoire that will go into it, have maybe a dozen slots free between my two retainers, 15 or so in my Saddlebag, and I still manage to keep (usually) one full 5x7 bag set of my personal inventory free for overflow until I can dump or GC turn-in items.
Yeah, it gets stretched when I want to craft a lot, but I manage, and one whole 5x7 tab and part of another in my inventory is all current expansion reagents for crafting food and potions. So I'm already doing that, I just make it work.
The price for me is about $13 a month. For perspective, almost every other MMO sub I know of is $15-$20. So FFXIV is already cheaper than the competition. And as others told you, with inflation factored in - here in the US, we've seen 40 year record bad inflation that hasn't been this bad since the stagflation/oil crisis of the 70s before I or most people my generation were born or even a concept for our parents to think about - it's even cheaper. When I started playing FFXIV, I could get a meal at a drive-thru for around $7 and now it's $11-$15. Go through McDs and get a medium Big Mac meal. Or through any other fast food place, Burger King, whatever. It probably will cost you more than a FFXIV sub, and if it doesn't, it'll only be a few bucks difference. And that's ONE meal you eat in under half an hour vs hours that you can log into FFXIV in a month. Go see a movie - those used to be $5 a ticket, now it's $12-15 with the cheap tickets being $10. And that's if you don't buy any food or drink. It easily can cost you $25 to go to a movie ALONE. Double that if you go on a date, and 3-5x that if you go with a spouse and children.
Streaming services like Netflix have gone up on their prices multiple times in the last few years to keep up with inflation, too. So while they offer a comparable amount of hours of entertainment, it comes at a higher cost than FFXIV does.
FFXIV is a bargain any way you look at it.
If you're buying extra retainers, that's a choice you're making; you don't need them.
If you're buying anything ELSE in the shop, that's ALSO a choice you're making; you don't need THEM, either.
And you can even play the game FOREVER if you make a trial account. There's a massive amount of content up through level 60 and HW, and they'll probably expand that to SB/70 in the future. I'm not an alt-y person, but I have considered making a trial account just for funzies, but there's SO MUCH TO DO IN IT it's insane. People have done stuff like get Necromancer or max (for their level) all Jobs, get all ARR and HW Relics, etc.
We have the same amount of patches we always have, though I do agree the loss of a Eureka/Bozja Exploration Zone has hurt. I hope they recognize that with 7.X and add one in.
$40-$50 sub (once every 2.5 years, but let's say 2 to make the math easy and say you're paying roughly $25 a year in new box) + $13 per month (if you aren't doing any bundles) for 12 months = $181. That's roughly equal to going through a drive-thru 18 times in a whole year (more like 15), going and seeing about 9 movies alone, 4.5 with a date, or 2 with a family, and if you only spent it on gaming, MAYBE 3 brand new AAA games, if they have no sub fees, microtransactions, DLCs, or season passes that you also buy along with them. My electric bill is more than half that. My cell phone bill is more than half that. Filling up a gas tank is about a quarter of that.
Still a pretty good deal all around, and better if you consider any of those other things.
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If you feel ripped off...cancel your sub? Subjectively, if you don't like it, then don't pay for it.
But objectively, you're wrong: It's arguably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment you can buy.
There are valid critiques about the game now - I just offered one relating to the Exploration Zones - but this endless hyperbole isn't going to change things for the better. "The sky is falling!" "DO something!!" aren't actionable arguments. "Patches are longer so content lulls are more noticeable. In SB and ShB, we had Exploration Zones to pad out that length, and we're missing that time sink now. Perhaps in 7.X you Devs should seriously consider doing another one, as it would make the longer patch cycle less empty to players and give them something they can continue to work towards in lull periods?" THAT is actionable critique.
The funny thing is, this is probably unironically true: Expansion = more excitement/activity/people coming to ask questions/etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by BRVV
The problem is when people do the analysis wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Avoidy
You picked a 7 day time period in that picture - or did you just s4ee that picture somewhere and copy it without looking at the "74" or dates timescale at the top?
You also can only get a general view of trends, not of numbers. What I mean by this is, the "people come in for the patch, slowly trickle out, come back for the next patch" is likely valid - so valid we don't need Steam data for that as that's something literally everyone will admit to when asked because it's just common sense and has been since the dawn of MMOs with patch cycles - but then you make the mistake: You assume Steam numbers are valid for the entire game.
Hence leading you to the wrong conclusion: "we get a few of them back for a new patch, and then we lose more people"
This is wrong, and this is why you can't use the Steam numbers. Believe it or not, the people playing through Steam aren't necessarily representative of the playerbase or population as a whole. There are quite a few reasons for this, but the long and short of it is, the Steam numbers don't match most other crawls and censuses done using the Lodestone (which IS the playerbase as a whole), meaning the Steam numbers are likely not representative of the whole.
So while you can infer a general trend - "expansion is a huge increase that trickles down a bit, gets a bump at the first patch then trickles down more, gets a bump at the next patch that trickles down around the same, repeat until X.5, then start the cycle over with the next expansion" - you cannot infer "a few" or "lose more" from those numbers unless you can establish they represent the playerbase as a whole, which you cannot. This leads to you drawing the wrong conclusion.
What we know from the data crawls that people like Lucky Bancho have done is that EW has more players than ShB which had more than SB. On net, the game is still growing. EW also lost fewer after the Expansion than ShB or SB did. The overall data indicates a continuing upward trend over time.
Is this inevitable or immutable? No. There's no reason to think that each expansion will continue to trend up.
But in discussing the current state of the game, it's valid to point out that the more reliable datasets indicate the game is still growing, and has the largest population it ever has had. I mean, actually look at even the numbers you posted, and I've added actual context:
https://i.imgur.com/yNQWCSu.jpeg
Apples-to-Apples, 5.4 to 6.4 (6.4 was released in May), 23,767 vs 44,087. That's NEARLY twice as many players!
"but what about now, after that patch??
Well, we can't use "last 30 Days", I suppose, since my number's bigger than yours, so let's use June since it's a completed month and the number won't change.
24,876 vs 36,308.
Hell, let's use "Last 30 Days" vs Feb 2021, which is the absolute most favorable to your argument:
31,117 vs 33,749.
Even with the best comparison possible for your argument, the game is STILL healthier/more populated - on Steam - than it was at the same time last expansion cycle in terms of peak players.
"But what about Avg?!"
14,751.1 vs 21,876.1
16,917.2 vs 21,494.1
18,882.7 vs 21,181.8
Not one of these supports your position that we are losing more than we are gaining on net when compared to the same point in the last expansion cycle. And look at the graph at the top of my screenshot. I picked "All" for the time so we could see the trend over the long-haul. What do you see? The game built up over 2021 as WoW faltered and the pandemic did pandemic things, peaked and then started the patch up/down that it's always had...and even now is still higher than it was before 2021. Before 2021, only the ShB release peak was comparable to the average lull now.
So even looking at JUST the Steam data - which as I've said is more pessimistic than other data sources on the game, and thus should be the thing that most strongly supports your argument, even THAT data is saying you're wrong and that the game is both growing over time, still on a positive trend, and still in a healthy place.
If we look at the non-Steam data, the picture is even better.
Objectively, the data doesn't support the argument people like you are making.
The problem isn't just you using data tilted towards your bias (the Steam data), it's you're not even using that data correctly to begin with.
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"we could at least stop losing more people than we gain," - objectively, we AREN'T "losing more people than we gain". That's the point. Your entire argument is based on a false statement, thus your conclusions are also incorrect.
And again, I say this as a person that thinks there are valid things that should be addressed and added (specifically to do in those lulls), but the numbers do not support the doomsaying or pessimism. NONE of the numbers/data do.