Seeing the same people in roulettes

Quote:

Originally Posted by Heavenchild

It is. Also compared to other games, it is.
Here, we have 2 price options. 10,99€ and 12,99€. And when u want to be able, to get everything u need 2 additional retainers (2x 1,40€).

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BRVV

They are going to add more forum posters with 7.0

The funny thing is, this is probably unironically true: Expansion = more excitement/activity/people coming to ask questions/etc.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Avoidy

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.

The problem is when people do the analysis wrong.

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.