New Lucky Bancho Census 12/1/17

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ficial_census/

Notes:

• Active players at around 809k
• JP: 290,164 / 36%
• NA: 360,693 / 45%
• EU: 157,770 / 19%
• Balmung still has 3.5k more than the 2nd highest server(Louisoix)
• Zalera is dead
• Omega population dipped 3k since October
• About 23k players unsubbed since the last census

Food for thought: Us Westerners make up 64% of this game's population ;D

Louisoix is filled with slackers. 36% of its players are at level 70.... :P

Tallying up the percentages:

- Omega sits with a 6.65% clear rate amongst all active characters compared to 7.97% from Creator.
- Ultimate has 210 characters who have cleared; 29 groups total according to FrostyTV's WF spreadsheet.

That last table is pretty illuminating. The game really struggles to get players to complete its 8 man raids. The JP servers have much higher clear rates, but this needs to be balanced with the fact that it's much more hardcore to do a traditional MMO there, and there are less options of its kind overall for them. But SE really seems to consistently fail with getting NA and EU overall successfully through the raids.

Oh, and ultimate savage was just gordias version 2. That's the same amount of clears if I remember for it, which means we have a pretty decent skill ceiling for "too hard" in this game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

That last table is pretty illuminating. The game really struggles to get players to complete its 8 man raids. The JP servers have much higher clear rates, but this needs to be balanced with the fact that it's much more hardcore to do a traditional MMO there, and there are less options of its kind overall for them. But SE really seems to consistently fail with getting NA and EU overall successfully through the raids.

Oh, and ultimate savage was just gordias version 2. That's the same amount of clears if I remember for it, which means we have a pretty decent skill ceiling for "too hard" in this game.

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I wouldn't say it's on SE to make sure NA/EU get clears any more or less than JP. Everyone has the same tools at their disposal. It's on the players and their respective communities to get the job done.

Well by that I mean SE really fails to make raids attractive to people. Low clear rates ultimately means its either too hard, or you have low overall participation. For the JP, they are a captive market...traditional MMOs are not as mainstream there as here, nor as prevalent. NA/EU simply isn't as captive, so their hardcore spreads out among a lot of games. I know in FFXI, the JP weren't really any better players than NA and were actually worse in some things, but no one did censuses then I think. And a lot of NA raided, they just spread out among the different kinds.

Like in FFXI, it was expected youd raid some when you hit cap. Here what's odd is that apparently we have a small raid pool, but no one tries to recruit or build, it's all on the individual player to apply via party finder.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

Oh, and ultimate savage was just gordias version 2. That's the same amount of clears if I remember for it, which means we have a pretty decent skill ceiling for "too hard" in this game.

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It's substantially less. Ultimate presently sits at 0.02%. Even Gordias broke above 1% throughout its lifespan.

In regards to low clear rates. I suspect a large contributing factor is how poor the difficulty curves are in this game. When you have such a wide gap between even reasonably challenging content, people just aren't prepared for it, especially when the game advertises a more casual pace. They really need to broaden the midcore level and make things less faceroll if they want to see higher participation in Savage. Something else to keep in mind is with the addition of Ultimate, less people who have cleared Omega will actively join PFs since they're progging.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

That last table is pretty illuminating. The game really struggles to get players to complete its 8 man raids. The JP servers have much higher clear rates, but this needs to be balanced with the fact that it's much more hardcore to do a traditional MMO there, and there are less options of its kind overall for them. But SE really seems to consistently fail with getting NA and EU overall successfully through the raids.

Oh, and ultimate savage was just gordias version 2. That's the same amount of clears if I remember for it, which means we have a pretty decent skill ceiling for "too hard" in this game.

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Having few people getting through raids is not unique to FFXIV. Raiders are a small (but highly visible and vocal) minority in most MMOs.

Lets not forget, we tend to have more options when it comes to mmos here as well as more pc gamers which open our options even more to both single and multi-player games.

A lot of the low NA numbers could simply be because raids in FFXIV are a lackluster series of bosses and the things they implement to keep us busy in between updates, like pvp and other misc activities is severely lacking and generally poorly designed, allows for quick clears with no incentive to return and filled with bots. So why should na raiders stay with ffxiv when they can literally beat something then unsub for 2+ months and not miss anything.

All the old content being throwaway, lack of innovative content, horrible pvp and what not when we have so many more options before us is likely more the culprit of low NA numbers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

It's substantially less. Ultimate presently sits at 0.02%. Even Gordias broke above 1% throughout its lifespan. .

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But Ultimate is one month out, and I think the numbers from Gordias at the same time were about those same level of clears. Lucky had a census from then if I remember, it might be linked in one of those posts. But Gordias really wasn't as optional I guess.