Discuss : is ffxiv in trouble

2) "To let you install new outfits from third-party sources" LOL ok

What a great performance that was btw, too bad most people can't hear your tone of voice via text on a forum.

The weak points FFXIV has are mostly with side content and repetitious content needed to grind out levels of other jobs, as well as the hardest content. So the core of the game is good, but that core only lasts so long and then people are stuck with the dregs.

The dregs of FFXIV are...

1) Savage
2) Hunts
4) Relic
5) Crafting and Gathering

The core of FFXIV is the same as any RPG: You fight things, go up in level, find ways to get money to buy better gear or just get better gear from dungeons, until someone completes the story or whatever it is for the current patch and expansion. Then there are the 8 man and 24 man raids, trials, etc that are around at end game to keep people busy (This includes EX).

The dregs are basically the vestigial content that gets bolted onto the main set of content that only some subset of the community gets involved with, or ends up being monopolized by a specific group of people. Since they aren't really considered core to the game they get released and then people are told to go have at it.

1) The Hunts Problem -> The hunts are an example of overworld content that gets monopolized. Effectively, people grouped together to form hunt trains to take down the hunts efficiently due to the increase in HP pool, which sounds great except that so many people end up going on these hunt trains thanks to DC travel, people can't even zone into the areas right away. Not to mention if someone is on a console they are at a disadvantage here because the load times are longer for them. Hunts can die in as little as 15 seconds after engagement, and that is the current hunts. Older hunts can die so quick on some nights that there has to be a wait period of about 5-10 seconds before pull, or too many people would just miss out.

2) Crafting and Gathering -> This is one of those things where its not really fun to do it, but you do it anyway because its needed for unlocking certain beast tribes, melding materia, and repairing your own gear. The system for crafting was supposed to make it interesting, but like all repetitive tasks that you end up having to do a lot of, the extra steps just make it tedious. People invented macros for crafting for a reason.

3) Savage -> The problem with savage is mostly they can never be consistent in designing the content and setting difficulty with it. That and the fact the fights get designed for specifically a set of roles means if you are playing the popular job, you're going to have a hell of a time trying to do savage as you compete with all the other Jims and Johns playing that same popular class. Meanwhile, the guy who decided to grit his teeth and play something repetitive and old has no trouble finding groups even if he is mediocre (Or you played a healer this expansion and survived the apocalypse known as Abyssos Tier)

4) Relic -> Its one of those things that either gets tied to something that is too repetitive, or comes in after the glory is over with the content it is attached to and then people feel the same burn as if it was attached to something repetitive. At least in Endwalker we just run around shooting hunts all day... unless you never did the Manderville quests. In that case, strap your butt in because you got some questing to do that will take you a good while.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

I disagree on population, I think the game is going to grow more with Dawntrail at least.

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The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

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Does it need to? The late ShB/early EW boost was massive, but you don't need massive boost every time to maintain stable growth. There won't be huge explosion in new players, that I'm sure, but there will be enough coming that the overall is still a net positive and that's enough.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

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Yep, also, a lot of the people who came here from WoW hyped it up as something it couldn't be and wasn't. And for the ones who stayed, a lot, if not most of them are burn outs from WoW that no ones there wanted to deal with anyways.

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Originally Posted by Heroman3003

Does it need to? The late ShB/early EW boost was massive, but you don't need massive boost every time to maintain stable growth. There won't be huge explosion in new players, that I'm sure, but there will be enough coming that the overall is still a net positive and that's enough.

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All of ShB was Covid and WoW exodus hype, and Early EW was the last of that hype dying out when all of those people couldn't clear past tier 2 of pandemonium.

Stormblood, an arguably better game then WoW at the point in time and a better XIV expansion had a longer retention rate.

Stormblood days were truly peak xiv times. The community was so much better back then.

Is FFXIV in trouble?

In a word - no.

In three words - not even close.

In three other words - quite the opposite.

Don't let the forums fool you. We represent only the smallest grain of sand compared to the playerbase, and people who take the time to visit the forums, make an account, and post here are far and away not representative of the typical player.

If you look over the history of FFXIV, each successive expansion has shown a steady rise in the size of the active playing population, and EW has continued that trend. There was an anomalous spike with the famous "WoW exodus," but if you remove that one-time gigantic explosion of people and subsequent fall-off (as most came to realize FFXIV and WoW are designed with two different audiences in mind), you'll see the same steady trend still ultimately occurred. At every comparable data point along the way (e.g. just before patch x.2, the first month of x.5, etc.), EW has had the highest active playerbase to date, surpassing ShB (which itself had been the highest up to that point).

Heck, with the latest patch, Aether hunt trains went back to announcing some of them only server-wide instead of DC-wide because they were getting too large. I can still queue for practically anything on tank or healer, including random dungeons or raids I haven't done in a while for WT, and get it to pop within a few minutes.

Will the typical formula that SE has had enormous success with eventually become stale? Yeah. It already has for some people, as evidenced by the forum here. But there's still such a reliable influx of new (and returning) players that it more than makes up for that. At some point down the road, the steady rise FFXIV is still experiencing will eventually reach a peak and then start declining. It's possible we're still going up. It's possible EW represents the peak. But we're certainly not on the decline yet, and even once that starts, the population will remain healthy for a considerable period of time even if the dev team did nothing to change course.

So no, FFXIV isn't in trouble. In fact - it's the complete opposite. It's thriving, and either at its peak or still climbing towards it.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

All of this

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While XIV certainly isn't failing, the problem with this mind set that it's better heard then read, I agree with a lot of this, but, the balance is still an issue that can come rearing it's ugly head once we're in DT. With the plan to rework all the jobs as Yoshida said, this can cause a massive rift, this expansion is lack luster in many ways and while I don't want it to be the case, EW wasn't the best expansion. The Question now is, can XIV stand up to having a truly bad expansion, every MMO eventually has one and will people have the same faith and ability to ride it out when it happens.

In every MMO historically, people are really quick to say it's fine in the moment until you have to actually be in the trenches calling out Devs and making a companies higher ups pay more attention to how an IP is being managed. No company is immune this this.

One thing unique to EW is it’s uniquely awful retention rate, all expansions see a drop off in their later patches, especially the lull between x.5 and x+1.0 but usually that dip is in the realm of 10-20%, according to the recent census data even though the WOW exodus affected the 6.0 launch 14 has lost close to 70% of its 6.0 playerbase numbers

That is not a healthy drop no matter how high they were coming down off

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Originally Posted by strawberrycake

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I mean, it already had 'bad' expansions. For gameplay, it was HW and its raiding situation, for story it was StB, seen as 'the low'. The real question remains on whether DT will be bad or good. Frankly, so far, it seems to be setting up to be another reiteration of ShB formula, just like EW was, but this time with everything that wasn't there being brought back. It will have field zone, unlike EW, it will introduce new limited job, it will introduce a rework to Deep Dungeons (basically new content as a result), it will have all the other normal things expected of expansion content. Frankly, content-wise, DT is setting up to be the richest expansion yet so far, potentially better than StB was.

This thread again, It happens so many times.

We are currently in a low content point.
But balmung has a login queue of 10-40 everyday at nearly anytime of the day.

They keep adding servers. Once they start merging servers is the only time you should think the game is slowing down.
God how are they going to deal with housing when they merge servers!!!

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Originally Posted by Kewitt

This thread again, It happens so many times.

We are currently in a low content point.
But balmung has a login queue of 10-40 everyday at nearly anytime of the day.

They keep adding servers. Once they start merging servers is the only time you should think the game is slowing down.
God how are they going to deal with housing when they merge servers!!!

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10-40 login queues aren’t queues, they are just bunching logins

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

10-40 login queues aren’t queues, they are just bunching logins

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This. You get queues at 3am on EU servers which are utterly dead at that time, because the login servers work in bulk.

Does that say anything about the population? No, but the myth that servers are so packed you get queues in the middle of the night needs to die.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

One thing unique to EW is it’s uniquely awful retention rate, all expansions see a drop off in their later patches, especially the lull between x.5 and x+1.0 but usually that dip is in the realm of 10-20%, according to the recent census data even though the WOW exodus affected the 6.0 launch 14 has lost close to 70% of its 6.0 playerbase numbers

That is not a healthy drop no matter how high they were coming down off

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I'm confused. You're acknowledging that the WoW exodus anomaly grossly affected the data, then...immediately proceed to use that data? The % you cite is "unique" to EW precisely because the "WoW exodus" is unique to EW. It occurred at the tail end of ShB, but its impact first showed up in the 6.0 numbers. Most of those players were never going to stay. They weren't coming to FFXIV because they had taken the time to learn about it. They came here because they were "fleeing" WoW and FFXIV was another very popular MMO, so it became a "natural" destination of sorts. But FFXIV's popularity comes precisely from focusing on a different audience, a different type of gamer. While there will always be some overlap among different games within a genre, people who had never even touched FFXIV before and only played WoW were highly unlikely to be the target audience.

What you really need to do is remove that anomaly and either use pre-exodus numbers as the starting point, or use post-6.1 numbers once the population spike had already resolved itself. Do either of those and you'll see EW's retention rate is nothing other than the natural rate it (and every MMO) experiences. There's nothing special about EW's retention, and certainly nothing to scream the sky is falling over.

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Originally Posted by Heroman3003

I mean, it already had 'bad' expansions. For gameplay, it was HW and its raiding situation, for story it was StB, seen as 'the low'. The real question remains on whether DT will be bad or good. Frankly, so far, it seems to be setting up to be another reiteration of ShB formula, just like EW was, but this time with everything that wasn't there being brought back. It will have field zone, unlike EW, it will introduce new limited job, it will introduce a rework to Deep Dungeons (basically new content as a result), it will have all the other normal things expected of expansion content. Frankly, content-wise, DT is setting up to be the richest expansion yet so far, potentially better than StB was.

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HW still had consistent player retention, Stormblood was the peak of gameplay for XIV. Both maintained consistent player growth and is what lead to the raid scene being as nuanced as it was prior to the 2 min meta.

So when i say bad, I don't mean gripes that can be handwaved away for what the rest of the game offers. I mean bad where it's just all irredeemable trash no one wants to touch, or the devs have lost player trust and have to earn it back. So far people are frustrated, but we all still trust them, and DT is looking good, but we havent seen the new systems in play, we do not know how much content per patch we're getting and we do not know if the job and content balance will be similar to EW, which is very possible. And if it is, a LOT of people will be mad and may lose trust for the first time.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

I'm confused. You're acknowledging that the WoW exodus anomaly grossly affected the data, then...immediately proceed to use that data? The % you cite is "unique" to EW precisely because the "WoW exodus" is unique to EW. It occurred at the tail end of ShB, but its impact first showed up in the 6.0 numbers. Most of those players were never going to stay. They weren't coming to FFXIV because they had taken the time to learn about it. They came here because they were "fleeing" WoW and FFXIV was another very popular MMO, so it became a "natural" destination of sorts. But FFXIV's popularity comes precisely from focusing on a different audience, a different type of gamer. While there will always be some overlap among different games within a genre, people who had never even touched FFXIV before and only played WoW were highly unlikely to be the target audience.

What you really need to do is remove that anomaly and either use pre-exodus numbers as the starting point, or use post-6.1 numbers once the population spike had already resolved itself. Do either of those and you'll see EW's retention rate is nothing other than the natural rate it (and every MMO) experiences. There's nothing special about EW's retention, and certainly nothing to scream the sky is falling over.

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1) if I use 6.1 data then between 6.1 and 6.5 the game has lost 45% of its playerbase, still not remotely a good number

2) I still have no idea why people just automatically assume the WOW players were a lost cause, 14 did absolutely nothing to even try to retain them (sure sure different game different crowd……) but if your competitor dumps 1 million players into your lap you try to hold onto them, not just do the same thing you’ve always done then go “nothing we could have done so sad”

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

1) if I use 6.1 data then between 6.1 and 6.5 the game has lost 45% of its playerbase, still not remotely a good number

2) I still have no idea why people just automatically assume the WOW players were a lost cause, 14 did absolutely nothing to even try to retain them (sure sure different game different crowd……) but if your competitor dumps 1 million players into your lap you try to hold onto them, not just do the same thing you’ve always done then go “nothing we could have done so sad”

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Yep, only the people who couldn;t keep up with the content or people who madethemselves hate wow stayed in XIV, and they were looking for a reason to finally leave, most WoW players went back to WoW.

The average active characters increased each expansion by around 200,000. It's no different in EW. It grew a lot more in EW but at the bare minimum stats we've seen (recently due to patch lull), there are 200,000 more persistently active characters than throughout Shadowbringers.

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Originally Posted by Heroman3003

I mean, it already had 'bad' expansions. For gameplay, it was HW and its raiding situation, for story it was StB, seen as 'the low'. The real question remains on whether DT will be bad or good. Frankly, so far, it seems to be setting up to be another reiteration of ShB formula, just like EW was, but this time with everything that wasn't there being brought back. It will have field zone, unlike EW, it will introduce new limited job, it will introduce a rework to Deep Dungeons (basically new content as a result), it will have all the other normal things expected of expansion content. Frankly, content-wise, DT is setting up to be the richest expansion yet so far, potentially better than StB was.

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Um akshewally SHB was the bad story, sb was the good story

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

1) if I use 6.1 data then between 6.1 and 6.5 the game has lost 45% of its playerbase, still not remotely a good number

2) I still have no idea why people just automatically assume the WOW players were a lost cause, 14 did absolutely nothing to even try to retain them (sure sure different game different crowd……) but if your competitor dumps 1 million players into your lap you try to hold onto them, not just do the same thing you’ve always done then go “nothing we could have done so sad”

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Because a lot of those players got caught up in the moment of "blizzard devs bad, boycott", and that just didn't last. They weren't looking for new games, they were looking for wow but not blizzard.





Turning XIV into wow to keep the wow players would have likely alienated people who play XIV because they enjoy it and don't want to play wow.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Because a lot of those players got caught up in the moment of "blizzard devs bad, boycott", and that just didn't last. They weren't looking for new games, they were looking for wow but not blizzard.





Turning XIV into wow to keep the wow players would have likely alienated people who play XIV because they enjoy it and don't want to play wow.

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And nobody was asking for anyone to turn 14 into WOW, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have tried to retain those players rather than declare them a lost cause before they even joined

If they joined, 14 tried to retain them and still failed then

1) the rest of us would have more content

2) at least they could say they tried so to speak

They really don’t have a leg to stand on when they didnt even try

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

And nobody was asking for anyone to turn 14 into WOW, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have tried to retain those players rather than declare them a lost cause before they even joined

If they joined, 14 tried to retain them and still failed then

1) the rest of us would have more content

2) at least they could say they tried so to speak

They really don’t have a leg to stand on when they didnt even try

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this is just false.

Endwalker was already basically in the can and you would have wanted them to rewrite and re develop everything on the off chance that the WoW immigrants were ACTUALLY interested and might stick around? pushing back release already ticked the regular people off, and you would have wanted them to push it back further, to try and impress people who had bagged on the game for years already because it wasnt WoW?

not sure what universe you live in, but in this one, successful companies dont trashbin an expansion based on a surprise influx, what ifs and wishful thinking. there are not any reasonable ways to retain those players that would not have annoyed long term players or caused an exodus here.

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

Given the way the game currently works right now using stb/shb and ew as a point of reference. A

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I am just here to point out the abbreviation of Stormblood is SB, not StB.
Games great, have a good day.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

this is just false.

Endwalker was already basically in the can and you would have wanted them to rewrite and re develop everything on the off chance that the WoW immigrants were ACTUALLY interested and might stick around? pushing back release already ticked the regular people off, and you would have wanted them to push it back further, to try and impress people who had bagged on the game for years already because it wasnt WoW?

not sure what universe you live in, but in this one, successful companies dont trashbin an expansion based on a surprise influx, what ifs and wishful thinking. there are not any reasonable ways to retain those players that would not have annoyed long term players or caused an exodus here.

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Why do y’all think so black and white

All I said is they could have tried to add some things rather than the same tired cadence of content that has been unbelievably slow since ShB and you immediately assume I’m saying “rewrite the entire expansion and make it so normal 14 players hate it”

Was an extra extreme trial and maybe a second deep dungeon as emergency additions to 6.1 too much to ask for

Sure 14 plans far in advance but if a competitor dumps an extra 40% of your current playerbase into your lap and you don’t try to do “something” because you have a design schedule then something has gone terribly wrong

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Originally Posted by Canadane

I am just here to point out the abbreviation of Stormblood is SB, not StB.
Games great, have a good day.

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I love this comment so much as a long time player, these new ppl all running around calling it STB is grating to my eyes, since it was decided long before shb launch that sb would remain sb , and shb would be shb.

is it in trouble currently? No.
Will it be in trouble in the future if it carries on as it is? Maybe?

I think the main issues with the game are pretty simple and have been discussed but ill list my 3.
1. Theirs not a lot of fun content once you finished endgame and done raids (which raids don't even have scaling content you either do really easy or content that's pretty hard), a lot of the content is too spread out for the core playerbase we all have to wait a long time to get new raids, dungeons, general content, I think this issue is also more of a issue because of point 2
2. The Job Gameplay is very boring and samey, once you played one job in a category you've pretty much played all of them, tanks and healers are a prime example of this, If jobs felt different then getting clears or leveling, or doing dailys would feel more fun to do, but currently theirs very little differences which makes me question why we're getting more jobs.
3. Synching down feels awful, most content 70 and under I can't stand personally, the lower the worse it gets, this makes half of the old content just really unfun and a lot of the times you will end up having to do old content over and over if you want to level a job or just if you get unlucky.

The three things I listed generally doesn't effect everyone and I do actually like the game otherwise i wouldn't comment about things i want to see better, I don't think we will have a sharp decline but endwalker launch is most likely the "peak" of ff14 player numbers, personally I hope the game becomes more fun I've certainly been drained from playing tank a role I used to love in SHB.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Why do y’all think so black and white

All I said is they could have tried to add some things rather than the same tired cadence of content that has been unbelievably slow since ShB and you immediately assume I’m saying “rewrite the entire expansion and make it so normal 14 players hate it”

Was an extra extreme trial and maybe a second deep dungeon as emergency additions to 6.1 too much to ask for

Sure 14 plans far in advance but if a competitor dumps an extra 40% of your current playerbase into your lap and you don’t try to do “something” because you have a design schedule then something has gone terribly wrong

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You come to realize most of the people in XIV and the extended FF fandom lack the ability to see nuance and lack critical thinking as a whole. To see the grey/gray reality of things would require them to see the natural flaws of XIV and understand why other MMO are equally as successful as XIV and to then come to the conclusion that Yoshida didn't want XIV to be The top MMO, and that he was fine with second or third place.

Also they have very little to no comprehension about how games work, or they like to play dumb. If Yoshida and Se were smart they would have catered to having more midcore replayable content that scales up for players, Yoshida was also say this in tandem with the whole you don't have to play all the time nonsense, which is, not all content is for you, something a lot of XIV players need to hear as well.

And for the slow and low amount of content, yeah I don't know why this is the only game on the market with such aggressive fomo and such a short turnover for current content.

All and All, history like with so man other MMOs, repeats itself, and no ones gonna notice all the things that are truly going wrong until the game is literally on fire and imploding, and then they'll all be scuttling to try and fix it.

And for all of you who still sadly lack reading comprehension, the former statement is not me implying that the game is gonna go boom in the near future.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

And nobody was asking for anyone to turn 14 into WOW, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have tried to retain those players rather than declare them a lost cause before they even joined

If they joined, 14 tried to retain them and still failed then

1) the rest of us would have more content

2) at least they could say they tried so to speak

They really don’t have a leg to stand on when they didnt even try

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What could they have done differently?


Development cycles are planned years in advance. What changes could they have made that would have kept wow players? What did the devs need to rush to do immediately to keep them here before the anger at blizzard wore off?

I don't think most wow players who left because of the exodus stayed any meaningful amount of time. They moved back after the shadowbringers launch. At that point, the ship had sailed.

I don't think that the game is going to end as Dawntrail s supposed to be the start of a new storyline. That being said I am worried about the coding myself because of the nature of what they did to get a functional game up and running after the disaster that was 1.0. Honestly what they did was incredible, but it did leave them on a weaker foundation than you would want for a MMO. With this game being as profitable as it is I expect that the dev team has probably already addressed at least some of those issues as they really don't want another launch like the launch of Endwalker

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Because a lot of those players got caught up in the moment of "blizzard devs bad, boycott", and that just didn't last. They weren't looking for new games, they were looking for wow but not blizzard.





Turning XIV into wow to keep the wow players would have likely alienated people who play XIV because they enjoy it and don't want to play wow.

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Who is realistically asking FF to turn into WoW though? All people wanted was a more enjoyable endgame. Nobody is asking for Torghast, visions or AP grinds.
There's things WoW does better and there's things FF does better. This whole WOW BAD hive mentality any time someone mentions something WoW does better that FF could borrow from, is just beyond weird.

Catering to turbo casuals and hardcore players alone just leaves everyone in the middle out.

With all the content up to endgame content they view as training you how to play your job. As someone who on another account had all jobs to 80 in shadowbringer I agree that the jobs start to feel like just a new coat of paint so are the new jobs every expansion necessary? I thought at one point that the extreme trials were supposed to be the in that slot of endgame between regular raiding and savage raiding but now a days it is often hard to find people to do those fights with as people just wait until the next expansion and do them unsynched if they want that particular mount. One thing I would like to see soon is for there to be relief of button bloat on some jobs. Maybe it is just me but sometimes it feels like I don't have enough fingers to hit all the buttons that I should be hitting and with this game possibly being played on controller this problem must be resolved if they want to keep controller support active.

Unfortunately, people are willing to give FFXIV too much credit and thus allows them to get away with it (Allowing them the reigns free from direct criticism and giving way to lower churn value). Other mmos have done WAY more than FFXIV. For example, Mabinogi has been here since 2005. That game has story up the wazoo, does events often and has events play at the same time (which aren't just do a 3 min quest), has a six channel dye system (when people are eating the slop that is the two channels upcoming), has a longer MSQ (about 26 main stories now), has unique skills and classes (which you can play all of), and is also undergoing a graphics overhaul [they are moving to Unreal]...compare that to this giant and you have to question the dime being put down on the game. And I think it's 100% acceptable to look at other MMOs and compare them to FFXIV to give it constructive criticism but people give the "it's fine as is." Well that whole debaucle thing is happening to Genshin vs HSR and is leading one to a much more inferior product IMO. Though maybe you say, well that's because it's the same company, you could then say Wuthering Waves vs Genshin then. (Same argument applies)

People give feedback because they love the game...not because they hate it. Though in this community, people would rather tell you to unsub then have them make a better product. It's very counterintuitive...

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

You failed to mention anything positive about FFXIV in your post, which is equal to complaining about it?

Oh, and by the way? If you don't like it, you can just go play other games. That's right: for just $13 a month, you can play all the other games you want as long as they're free.

Another troll defeated, the game is now safe from haters. Mods, please lock this

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A-are you OK there champ?

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Originally Posted by Canadane

I am just here to point out the abbreviation of Stormblood is SB, not StB.
Games great, have a good day.

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Then ppl would confuse it for shadowbringers lol

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Is FFXIV in trouble?

In a word - no.

In three words - not even close.

In three other words - quite the opposite.

Don't let the forums fool you. We represent only the smallest grain of sand compared to the playerbase, and people who take the time to visit the forums, make an account, and post here are far and away not representative of the typical player.

If you look over the history of FFXIV, each successive expansion has shown a steady rise in the size of the active playing population, and EW has continued that trend. There was an anomalous spike with the famous "WoW exodus," but if you remove that one-time gigantic explosion of people and subsequent fall-off (as most came to realize FFXIV and WoW are designed with two different audiences in mind), you'll see the same steady trend still ultimately occurred. At every comparable data point along the way (e.g. just before patch x.2, the first month of x.5, etc.), EW has had the highest active playerbase to date, surpassing ShB (which itself had been the highest up to that point).

Heck, with the latest patch, Aether hunt trains went back to announcing some of them only server-wide instead of DC-wide because they were getting too large. I can still queue for practically anything on tank or healer, including random dungeons or raids I haven't done in a while for WT, and get it to pop within a few minutes.

Will the typical formula that SE has had enormous success with eventually become stale? Yeah. It already has for some people, as evidenced by the forum here. But there's still such a reliable influx of new (and returning) players that it more than makes up for that. At some point down the road, the steady rise FFXIV is still experiencing will eventually reach a peak and then start declining. It's possible we're still going up. It's possible EW represents the peak. But we're certainly not on the decline yet, and even once that starts, the population will remain healthy for a considerable period of time even if the dev team did nothing to change course.

So no, FFXIV isn't in trouble. In fact - it's the complete opposite. It's thriving, and either at its peak or still climbing towards it.

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I never understand this "Don't listen to the forums" argument. Isn't everyone on here one of those players casual or not... so should there opinion be downplayed. If I ask around in game I'd get all the same mixed bag of responses.. trust me I am vocal about my concerns in game too. And most say all the same things. Either
*it's fine
* it's not fine

Ironically. Most aren't happy with it. Try asking urself in nn or ur fc and see what they say. Or in Discords. I just don't get this argument

I think it's worthwhile to engage with well thought out opinions. Unfortunately, a lot of forum regulars eventually get addicted to reactions rather than conversations. Asking if the sky is falling is a great way to score on engagement metrics, but doesn't really have enough specifics to go off in terms of discussion content.

I wouldn't know what to do with FFXIV's sales figures. I hope they do well, but it's also not my problem either way.

Well, the other piece is the change to a 2 minute meta and how it plays with the stats. We had more customization to the jobs before this point thanks to skill / spell speed lending to different playstyles on jobs. There was always a preferred way to play before but the 2 minute meta kind of increased the gap a lot. But given the preference for OGCDs now and the waning usage from design changes to tenacity and piety, I'm surprised we still have MP as a resource. :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Katish

Unfortunately, people are willing to give FFXIV too much credit and thus allows them to get away with it (Allowing them the reigns free from direct criticism and giving way to lower churn value). Other mmos have done WAY more than FFXIV. For example, Mabinogi has been here since 2005. That game has story up the wazoo, does events often and has events play at the same time (which aren't just do a 3 min quest), has a six channel dye system (when people are eating the slop that is the two channels upcoming), has a longer MSQ (about 26 main stories now), has unique skills and classes (which you can play all of), and is also undergoing a graphics overhaul [they are moving to Unreal]...compare that to this giant and you have to question the dime being put down on the game. And I think it's 100% acceptable to look at other MMOs and compare them to FFXIV to give it constructive criticism but people give the "it's fine as is." Well that whole debaucle thing is happening to Genshin vs HSR and is leading one to a much more inferior product IMO. Though maybe you say, well that's because it's the same company, you could then say Wuthering Waves vs Genshin then. (Same argument applies)

People give feedback because they love the game...not because they hate it. Though in this community, people would rather tell you to unsub then have them make a better product. It's very counterintuitive...

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This, I always say it, if this was any other game company people would have been up in arms with how the game is doing right now, and how the game has been over the expansion and the lack of Yoshida doing hotfixes for these issue, an industry standard at this point in ALL online games mind you. Too many people will turn a blind eye to how XIV as a game hasn't caught up in so many ways and say thats fine but then come on here and crap talk another game dev who finally had their first hiccup. It's sad to see.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

I never understand this "Don't listen to the forums" argument. Isn't everyone on here one of those players casual or not... so should there opinion be downplayed. If I ask around in game I'd get all the same mixed bag of responses.. trust me I am vocal about my concerns in game too. And most say all the same things. Either
*it's fine
* it's not fine

Ironically. Most aren't happy with it. Try asking urself in nn or ur fc and see what they say. Or in Discords. I just don't get this argument

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While people here will actively downplay other people's thoughts on the game, I don't think the developers are doing it. It's a thing that's done on an individual basis.

For example, I can say the game is dead for me, because all my friends have quit, my FC has died (twice), and whenever I DO manage to meet up with some of the old crew for some games (Helldivers is the new hotness, very good game), a common inside joke is "Imagine playing a game that you actually like and the developers actually care about." And by common, I mean literally anytime we squad up, one of the post-game conversations is "are we ever going back to XIV" and the answer is always "Wish we could, but the game sucks now."

We're literally reinforcing (haha helldivers) our own collective echo chamber, which is what's going to happen when all the friends/contacts you made in the game ALSO hate it. It is the definition of a confirmation bias.

I can say that "most" of my circle is not happy. People who think like us are not happy. I am not happy. If you are happy, that's cool, but like, I don't care, much like how they didn't care when they ruined all my jobs to make them more "accessible".

It is what it is.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

While people here will actively downplay other people's thoughts on the game, I don't think the developers are doing it. It's a thing that's done on an individual basis.

For example, I can say the game is dead for me, because all my friends have quit, my FC has died (twice), and whenever I DO manage to meet up with some of the old crew for some games (Helldivers is the new hotness, very good game), a common inside joke is "Imagine playing a game that you actually like and the developers actually care about." And by common, I mean literally anytime we squad up, one of the post-game conversations is "are we ever going back to XIV" and the answer is always "Wish we could, but the game sucks now."

We're literally reinforcing (haha helldivers) our own collective echo chamber, which is what's going to happen when all the friends/contacts you made in the game ALSO hate it. It is the definition of a confirmation bias.

I can say that "most" of my circle is not happy. People who think like us are not happy. I am not happy. If you are happy, that's cool, but like, I don't care, much like how they didn't care when they ruined all my jobs to make them more "accessible".

It is what it is.

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Yeah thats when people in this game act like it's a you problem, but they don't realize having a high turnover rate and a high new player influx isn;t good for your game. This rotation of end game players with new game players In ARR, ShB, and EW isn;t good, we lose as many as we get and it's noticeable if you ever look around and see outside your own collective bubble, but not many people in this game, or at least on these forums know how to do that.

I know plenty of people who talk about XIV just like your friends, And they were long time players who just gave up when simple questions could never be answered by Yoshida. They felt like he didn;t care.