We lost 70% of our player base half a year in

Did you say...
More chance of winning a house lottery and more chance of houses being demolished when the timer is resumed?
Then I'll say moooooreeee lose more!!!! lose 99%, everyone gets a house, a house for everyone!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

https://i.ibb.co/MPBmpDh/Untitled.png

People have been saying make healers more engaging since Shadowbringers, and it’s been ignored.

People have been saying endgame is horrible with lack of content and it’s been ignored.

People want better hairstyles and headgears on the new races and it's been ignored.

After an ENTIRE year of receiving player feedback and FAILING to do what the community wants, now we have them scrambling to fix critical bugs after bugs like the housing lottery bug.

What a joke.

I wanted FF14 to thrive, I loved Stormblood but the game is dying and on it’s way out.

Square Enix, changes need to be made FAST.

NOT in 7.0, NOT in 8.0, it needs to happen THIS EXPANSION or you WILL lose the remaining player base.

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Thanks for the schlock thread. FFXIV is doing fantastically well. It is easily the highest population sub mmo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reap00

Thanks for the schlock thread. FFXIV is doing fantastically well. It is easily the highest population sub mmo.

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Battle of the trolls!

Cherrypicking a data point at the absolute high point and claiming the game is a disaster based on that single data point is misleading. What did the playerbase look like 7 months into ShB vs today (7 months into EW)?

That is like focusing on how the Dow Jones is 10% down from its peak but 10% up since Jan 2021. Depending which data point is your starting point, the situation is either really good really bad.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dspguy

Cherrypicking a data point at the absolute high point and claiming the game is a disaster based on that single data point is misleading. What did the playerbase look like 7 months into ShB vs today (7 months into EW)?

That is like focusing on how the Dow Jones is 10% down from its peak but 10% up since Jan 2021. Depending which data point is your starting point, the situation is either really good really bad.

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I love those statistics you get on hot button topics.

"devastating statistic" source, 2009, 2012, first month of 2021 - only used the data from one particular city's sub district, applying the data to the entire country. Were the other years not available....? They were available? Oh then why are you not using them? No particular reason I'm sure. . .

Annoying too because usually such things discredit the ideas overall, when perhaps the core concept was fine but it got manipulated highly inappropriately to make it "more" outrageous.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reap00

Thanks for the schlock thread. FFXIV is doing fantastically well. It is easily the highest population sub mmo.

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What other sub mmos are still around anyway? All I can think of are this and WoW.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

What other sub mmos are still around anyway? All I can think of are this and WoW.

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Doesn't EVE Online have one? RuneScape is pretty much subscription based if you want to enjoy any content at all (free to play is INCREDIBLY limited, you are locked out of half of the world lol).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Doesn't EVE Online have one? RuneScape is pretty much subscription based if you want to enjoy any content at all (free to play is INCREDIBLY limited, you are locked out of half of the world lol).

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ESO is pretty much the same. Sure you can play for free, but the fact that the sub gives you an infinite inventory for crafting materials and access to all expansions except the current one makes the sub almost mandatory.


If we strictly look at the subscription then the ESO sub gives you more value for it's price than XIV's does.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

What other sub mmos are still around anyway? All I can think of are this and WoW.

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Depends on your definition (and you'd have to really stretch before doing your mental gymnastics here to argue that point).

Even a lot of "free to play" MMOs have subscriptions, and Given that FFXIV has a couple hundred hours worth of content for free, it's tough to define that.

Overall though, it's likely not true WoW likely still beats it out, but nobody knows because no MMOs really release active players.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

Overall though, it's likely not true WoW likely still beats it out, but nobody knows because no MMOs really release active players.

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XIV supposedly overtook WoW at some point last year, at the end of Shadowbringers. But considering that the massive influx of players has since died down, most likely due to most WoW players returning to their main game, I'd take a wild guess and say that WoW is back to being number 1.

At the end of the day we don't know, since we don't have accurate active subscription numbers for either game.

I think more than anything the "WoW exodus" has been long enough in the past that the people who tried the game and think its for them have stayed, and those who didn't have left. Perhaps there was a large amount of those people who were holding out for EW to see what all would change, the new things etc and if they didn't like it they may have quit or not. A large amount of those people didn't stay behind, but I don't think it's right to say that the game is taking some massive downward slope because of that as nobody could've expected all of those players to start when they did. Rather, comparing the population of the game proportionally to around this time back in ShB would likely give a better picture of what's going on.

For as many problems with healing and a small amount of other things I have and I complain about on here, I think it's disingenuous to act as if this is a HUGE deal, but at the same time it shouldn't be ignored. If anything, SE needs to include more options to leave as feedback for when you unsubscribe from the game and maybe send an email when someone lets their sub lapse; if there is a problem that is causing people to unsub in huge amounts, the stated options you can choose are awful for leaving any actual feedback. Of the times I've unsubbed, I have 0 way of telling them "because you made my favorite jobs unfun to play" or providing constructive feedback, so it's not surprising when Yoshida says things like "I wasn't aware this was an issue" if that's actually true.

I think the game is just finally adjusting for the influx of players it had and its finally been enough time for them to decide to either "commit" or quit. AFAIK they're still planning on rolling out new servers for both EU and NA data centers, so I would think this wouldn't be in the pipeline anymore if there was a massive population drop that SE themselves was noticing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Data point is still a data point. Shouldn't simply be dismissed outright.

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If used in a correct context.

JoshStrifeHayes made a video about EQ2. He looked at Steam analytics where a very small amount of people were playing, and he stated the game was dying. That was disingenuous because there is an official launcher that has been out since EQ2 inception. Playing through Steam only came out recently.

Same with FF14. The official launcher has been out since inception and only recently on Steam.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nizzi

...

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If you are a new player starting out, this game has a pretty good amount of content for a decent while, but it has been enough time since last year, for most of these players to have finished the story, and done much of the content.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

Same with FF14. The official launcher has been out since inception and only recently on Steam.

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As far as I'm aware, FF has been on Steam for awhile, and well before the big surges of players to the game. However, the game is also on consoles, but I generally do agree with the datapoint. If players have dropped on Steam, other platforms are most likely seeing a similar decline.

Personally, I don't play the game on Steam, and play it through the launcher.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Doesn't EVE Online have one? RuneScape is pretty much subscription based if you want to enjoy any content at all (free to play is INCREDIBLY limited, you are locked out of half of the world lol).

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Oh yeah for sure, a lot of games do have "optional" subs..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

Depends on your definition (and you'd have to really stretch before doing your mental gymnastics here to argue that point).

Even a lot of "free to play" MMOs have subscriptions, and Given that FFXIV has a couple hundred hours worth of content for free, it's tough to define that.

Overall though, it's likely not true WoW likely still beats it out, but nobody knows because no MMOs really release active players.

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When I think of sub-based I do generally think of subs being actually mandatory, like WoW or FFXIV (disregarding free trial). Nowadays a lot of games do have those "optional" subs, but are still technically free to play, or buy to play.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Is it "hysterics" to think that maybe an MMO shouldn't be content to have only a base of a third their expansion release numbers or two-thirds their patch numbers? That there should be a bit more to do in the mainstream content flow than just the new MSQ and initial raid clears?

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The simple reality is that developers can never create content faster than consumers can consume it, without resorting to extremely predatory grinds like Korean MMOs, or on a lesser scale, many systems Blizzard has introduced into WoW across various expansions that are massive time sinks for the sake of being time sinks. If you create a game that respects a player's time like FF14 by not trapping them in insane grinds, it's an inevitability that once people chew through the content they desire, they'll move on to the next shiny thing that releases - why do you think so many games these days are trying to adopt the live service/season pass trend, much akin to a structure that's similar to an MMO with its patch cycles? Because even if the numbers will never be the same as on a game's release, delivering content at a later date will draw back some of those players that had once moved on.

The numbers in the OP's post are disingenuous, because of the fact that it's the exact same trend across every expansion since FF14 was released on Steam. HW, SB, SHB, EW, you can see they all get massive spikes, followed by a very large drop-off, then a steady climb back up in numbers as the next expansion begins to approach as everyone comes back to enjoy all the new content from all patches at once and get caught up, and you can easily see this on the graphs others have posted in rebuttal to OP earlier in the topic.

Claiming FF14 is dying off of a trend that has happened literally 5 times now is literally doomsaying and attempting to spread Hysterics for unfounded reasoning.

MMOs, and games in general, will always be spiky in nature in this day and age. With so much competition and so many shiny new games releasing all the time, having a 1/3rd retention on any game released 6 months post a major release is a pretty decent statistic. Even comparing the new kid in the town, Lost Ark (which is entirely steam based so the numbers are even more accurate afaik) went from nearly 1.3mil peak players 5 ish months ago to 500k average in the last 30 days, or about a 60% decrease across slightly under the same timeframe as EW -> to now, and that's a game that has the predatory long-term grinds to keep people playing. That currently playing number also includes the gold bots in Lost Ark, which is hard to say how big of a volume they encompass, compared to FF14, where the bots will almost entirely be using the normal client or the quick launcher due to the steam one being way too cumbersome to work with their 3rd party automation programs.

TL : DR, FF14 ain't dying. It's experiencing the exact. same. trend. It and the vast majority of games in this industry do 6 months after a release - so many have finished what they wanted to do in FF14 for now, and have moved on to other games. Some will come back for major patch hits, a not insignificant amount will wait until end of expansion to come back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

If you are a new player starting out, this game has a pretty good amount of content for a decent while, but it has been enough time since last year, for most of these players to have finished the story, and done much of the content.

As far as I'm aware, FF has been on Steam for awhile, and well before the big surges of players to the game. However, the game is also on consoles, but I generally do agree with the datapoint. If players have dropped on Steam, other platforms are most likely seeing a similar decline.

Personally, I don't play the game on Steam, and play it through the launcher.

Oh yeah for sure, a lot of games do have "optional" subs..

When I think of sub-based I do generally think of subs being actually mandatory, like WoW or FFXIV (disregarding free trial). Nowadays a lot of games do have those "optional" subs, but are still technically free to play, or buy to play.

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A lot of the current "f2p" games launched with subs, failed/didnt get investor returns fast enough on the sub model, and then went f2p.

Swtor, ESO, etc.

Where is the evidence to "steam users are only 15% of the playerbase"? Considering a large portion of the players use mods from that launcher which also requires steam validation I think defenders are pulling their numbers out of their rear.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

If used in a correct context.

JoshStrifeHayes made a video about EQ2. He looked at Steam analytics where a very small amount of people were playing, and he stated the game was dying. That was disingenuous because there is an official launcher that has been out since EQ2 inception. Playing through Steam only came out recently.

Same with FF14. The official launcher has been out since inception and only recently on Steam.

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Steam launcher has existed for over 7 years.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

Where is the evidence to "steam users are only 15% of the playerbase"? Considering a large portion of the players use mods from that launcher which also requires steam validation I think defenders are pulling their numbers out of their rear.



Steam launcher has existed for over 7 years.

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Pretty sure that launcher doesn't require steam validation. Only steam users require steam validation

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

Funny, because that graph shows that there are fewer people in 6.1 than in early 2021 before the WoW influx.

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I'm not seeing where you're getting that. Looking at the top graph, the farthest right (most recent) point is higher than in January of 2021, and is higher than May of 2019. Looking at the bottom graph, we have a substantial increase in players in 2019 with the lead up to Shadowbringers and a much higher concurrent player count going forward from ShB release.

Servers still has small queues, no need steam charts for validation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hunkygladiator

Snip

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Is that a steam chart?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Yushees

Servers still has small queues, no need steam charts for validation.

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The queues exist due to dated server infrastructure. Players are handled in batches if they want to teleport to a different zone or get into the game itself. It's why there's a risk of people being locked out of a zone if there's a hunt train going on during prime time hours.

Still seeing new sprouts. FF14 definitely got new players.

The game is becoming stale for me though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

TL : DR, FF14 ain't dying. It's experiencing the exact. same. trend. It and the vast majority of games in this industry do 6 months after a release - so many have finished what they wanted to do in FF14 for now, and have moved on to other games.

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I never said it was.

I pointed out only that its play is a bit spikier than is typical for similar MMOs. Having a long-term base less than a third its expansion release and less than two-thirds its at-patch-drop values is a sharper rise and fall than most face.

And the question I therefore asked was whether that design maximizes XIV's benefits. Is that spikiness the superior way to build the game, as compared to, say, having a bit more content longevity not dependent on extrinsic rewards and/or completionism?

Quote:

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The simple reality is that developers can never create content faster than consumers can consume it, without resorting to extremely predatory grinds like Korean MMOs.

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This seems either mildly disingenuous or a failure of imagination. Content can last without being dependent upon or creating grinds.

Look at games like Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire; their longevity is primarily based on their ability to automatically scale and reiterate from a base model in order to retain challenge and better continue to offer novelty. Whereas content here is pretty one-and-done outside of mind-numbing grinds because this game's only reiterability is the sorry excuse we see in PotD and HoH.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Theodric

The queues exist due to dated server infrastructure. Players are handled in batches if they want to teleport to a different zone or get into the game itself. It's why there's a risk of people being locked out of a zone if there's a hunt train going on during prime time hours.

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Meanwhile on JP server, there's no queue at all on morning :)

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Originally Posted by Knot_D

Meanwhile on JP server, there's no queue at all on morning :)

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I get a queue when I log in during JP primetime, and I'm not even on one of the more populous servers in the region. JP primetime is my mornings during the week, Saturday morning through mid-afternoon, with Sunday being ok, if about half to three-quarters as many as Saturday. The only times I don't get queues are my weekday evenings which is their weekday morning.

There are an abnormal obsession in this forum with the whole thing about "this game is dying" that I do not understand at all. It is like those who run around in panic convinced that the Apocalypse is about to happen and because it won't happen either hide or look for a stupid excuse.

https://external-content.duckduckgo....gif&f=1&nofb=1

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kpxmanifesto

Yeah, Asmongold will pump up those numbers by quite a bit. If Asmongold can't save FFXIV then we are truly in a dire situation.

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If FFXIV needs a Streamer to "save" it, it doesn't really deserve to be saved.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shibi

He's a bit predictable.

https://i.gyazo.com/f472852aa240ac2c...1861742fd3.png

I won't need to look in his lodestone to see a single level 90 healer and a FC with 1 person in it either.

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This person seems to either waste money on buying new accounts on a game they seem to love to hate

or

This person is a very disgruntled SQE employee and can give themselves games licences either freely or extremely cheaply.

Either that or there are sources for super dirt cheap game licences that are being sold with one or more high level characters included ( a similar black-market ebay like game licence plagues GTA online)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by WhiteWitch

yea because who wants to do the same stuff every expansion? people come for story and then leave. even the story was just ok this time around.
new savages? who cares, even though all the boss are different they use the same moves, left cleave arena, look away, half party stacks..

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So it's a MMO?
We've gotten and are getting new content too.
I dunno what boss you're even talking about with '' look away '', you're really oversimplifying the mechanics too.

Have you even cleared it?
Because it doesn't sound like it.

I am not having any issues either finding people to do content and everywhere I go is full of people so clearly there's a lot of people who aren't just doing the MSQ and then leave.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

There are an abnormal obsession in this forum with the whole thing about "this game is dying" that I do not understand at all. It is like those who run around in panic convinced that the Apocalypse is about to happen and because it won't happen either hide or look for a stupid excuse.

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There's an abnormal obsession on this forum with complaining about every single thing and even totally imagined problems with the game.

In fairness to this topic tho, this is a thing people say about every MMO since basically day 1.
People have been saying that the game is dying since ARR and the game has only grown in players since ARR.
People don't care they just keep repeating it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kolsykol

There's an abnormal obsession on this forum with complaining about every single thing and even totally imagined problems with the game.

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I believed this to be the case, so I took a few weeks off away from the official forums. Turns out I was right. Basically everyone (not literally everyone) I encounter in game, reddit, twitter, twitch, youtube, basically everywhere but here, who actually plays the game, is very happy with it. I mean, these forums are in a rough place when reddit is more positive about the game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

I believed this to be the case, so I took a few weeks off away from the official forums. Turns out I was right. Basically everyone (not literally everyone) I encounter in game, reddit, twitter, twitch, youtube, basically everywhere but here, who actually plays the game, is very happy with it. I mean, these forums are in a rough place when reddit is more positive about the game.

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Agree 100%. Most of these forums I've found consist of armchair developers who love spending their days complaining over anything and everything. *shrug* Why I generally only come here once in a while.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

I believed this to be the case, so I took a few weeks off away from the official forums. Turns out I was right. Basically everyone (not literally everyone) I encounter in game, reddit, twitter, twitch, youtube, basically everywhere but here, who actually plays the game, is very happy with it. I mean, these forums are in a rough place when reddit is more positive about the game.

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Kind of working with a skewed sample though. The people still playing right now during a content drought would, in fact, be the people who are satisfied enough with it or can make their own fun out of it. There are people who play this game just to party and dance at RP venues on the weekends. There are some people who subscribe just to play gimmick characters and do shout chat, and I've seen these people standing around towns for years and I'm sure they'll be standing around towns for years to come. That doesn't mean the game doesn't have issues or lack content and features in certain areas.

Most everybody I know no longer plays the game or enjoys it. The ones I know of that are still subscribed are just in it for the housing. I personally saw my interest in the game steadily wane throughout the entirety of Shadowbringer and Endwalker was just the nail in the coffin. I logged in for the free weekend since I still had the game installed and there was really nothing I felt interested in doing. The things that interested me from the Endwalker announcement were Island Sanctuary and whatever the next deep dungeon in, but neither of those things are out. There is no meaningful small group content in this game, and when people point out a lack of things to do they're just given a trite, "Go do savage."

As for the forums, they don't seem particularly worse or more negative than any other MMO's official forums. I think people tend to take criticisms, constructive or otherwise, to official forums because they have a sense that those criticisms will actually be seen and taken in by the developers. XIV's subreddit is notoriously positive from what I've heard, and so it's also pretty useless unless you're only wanting to see fan art and low effort memes.

It's probably a good sign that there are people that still care enough to post criticism and feedback on these forums. I think given a long enough timeline, the only people left on official forums are the diehards who will take whatever comes with a game. I took a look at GW2's forums not too long ago and it was very different from how I remember it being in its first 2-3 years. The attitude that I saw there was mostly, "It's too much work. The devs will never do it. It's a waste of resources to add a new race." etc. Sound familiar?

Yeah, Steam client numbers for this game is a literal drop in the bucket. xD

This isn't the first time i've seen Steam chart numbers obscure the facts of a games player numbers. Although it's probably one of the unspoken reason's ArenaNet still has held back releasing GW2 on Steam, despite it being in the works since 2019

Just saw this so I only read the OP so far. Yeah the game isn't at risk of dying but it will decay. They can't change direction as soon as this expansion, takes ages to plan and execute a major shift in direction so it needed to have happened a long time ago to see results now.

I am very receptive to anyone who agrees that the formula is beyond stale; I loved this game once and want to love it in the future but creatively they aren't treating it like it's important, just spinning the wheels. Some of the important team members behind XIV have been involved in XVI development for a while now, which you might theorize has something to do with the content pipeline feeling like it's on auto-pilot a bit.

I don't want our negative feedback to demoralize team members who work hard and it's not any one person's fault but... well the scope of what they're allowed to work on is limited by the direction set by a certain director and producer. I would like very much for Yoshida-san to take some risk in creating a new kind of MMO experience for ffxiv's second decade. Rethink the whole model instead of waiting more years for the old game to be run into the ground.

Expansions should be more than just an opportunity to tell stories. I want to know how the content loop will be refreshed. How will my daily activity be different than every other expansion before it. So far there's been close to zero difference throughout the lifetime of the game. Grind the linear dungeons and fates to cap, then farm some tightly scripted trial/raid for uninspired loot to keep our item level current. Ok maybe change anything about that some time because it's not interesting enough to keep repeating for the rest of our lives.

I don't think using the steam players as a number of players in this game is a good example of it, you have those who play it through the official launcher, mac players, and Playstation players steam can't account for.

I play on PC and I know well enough to not have bought FFXIV through steam.

Nothing about the numbers on the image concerns me.

Looks like a huge flood in December (the release of Endwalker), then some fall off. People came back for a bit in April (6.1) and then fell off again as they saw all the new content. This happens with every MMORPG.

Not saying the game doesn't have some issues that need to be resolved. Not saying I wouldn't mind more non-instanced content either. But these numbers are just showing the usual trend of activity.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

Agree 100%. Most of these forums I've found consist of armchair developers who love spending their days complaining over anything and everything. *shrug* Why I generally only come here once in a while.

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As a developer myself, it's easy to tell who is an armchair developer by their choice of wording as well.

Here is an easy one, saying spaghetti code won't get you any respect.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

Agree 100%. Most of these forums I've found consist of armchair developers who love spending their days complaining over anything and everything. *shrug* Why I generally only come here once in a while.

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you forgot that a good percentage of the people in the forums seem to truly dislike the game and have nothing good to say about... anything. and yet they obviously still pay the sub. boogles the mind really. their only defense is "but, I love the game so much, I am entitled to complain"

one often wonders if they are actually playing the same game

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

you forgot that a good percentage of the people in the forums seem to truly dislike the game and have nothing good to say about... anything. and yet they obviously still pay the sub. boogles the mind really. their only defense is "but, I love the game so much, I am entitled to complain"

one often wonders if they are actually playing the same game

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Agreed.

Im having a blast, working on levelling jobs. I am enjoying the Ameliance story immensely.. i laughed my head off when....

...she basically outdid Rowena with a sweet smile..you can see that she and Tataru are birds of a feather. Dont let that smile deceive you, she is the wife of Alphy's father and NO ONE'S fool. Shrewd and brilliant. I almost felt sorry for Rowena....ALMOST :D:D:D