A serious discussion about abridging the story quest 1-50 (discouraging new players)

[KisaiTenshi]

This thread alone has already proven otherwise at least thirty times over.

FFXIV's raids, trials and endgame are actually pretty damn good, by MMO standards. The people I've been trying to get to play FFXIV are the same people I've raided with in previous games. These are people who will stay subbed to a game for a LOOOONG time, so long as you keep challenging them with new raid content.

Nah, all that has been proven in the thread is there are two people who hate stories and are playing the wrong game and want to turn FFXIV into a plotless WoW-clone. No Thanks.

Here's the thing. If we even give SE the idea that we don't care for the story, we won't get any more of it. Why would a developer spend the boatloads of money needed to have a cohesive storyline, lore and such, only for it to be optional? That's like ordering a Pepperoni pizza just to eat the pepperoni's and garbage the rest. Sure a few people might do this because they don't care, but the majority of the playerbase is playing FFXIV because they want to be playing a Final Fantasy game. Not a WoW-clone and not a MOBA.

Would this game do any better if it was based on Disney (a la Kingdom Hearts)? Would hardcore raiders come into it demanding that they remove all the Disney bits just so they could fight the non-Disney parts?

Like this is the lunacy of the argument in this thread.

If you someone doesn't want to play Final Fantasy, there are other games more suited to them. Final Fantasy is the largest RPG franchise inside and outside Japan. The Final Fantasy Franchise is larger than the Warcraft one. But you need context for this argument, since Final Fantasy includes every version of the game going back to FFI. Warcraft includes only WoW as it's the only RPG.

Final Fantasy XIV has 4 million subscribers, WoW has 7.1 million subscribers. What should be noted is that every time there is an expansion pack for WoW, the number of players doubles for about 3 months and then returns to below where it started. If you look at Blizzard-Activision's Quarterly reports, you'll note that there are more people playing Hearthstone than there are WoW which is a freemium CCG.

https://www.superdataresearch.com/ma...ta/mmo-market/

CHANGING CONSUMER PREFERENCES

The success of MOBA titles indicates a subtle but important shift in the way people like to play online. Offering the same fast paced action as first-person shooter games, MOBAs have quickly become one of the most popular game genres worldwide, growing their share of the overall MMO category from 16% to 24% in just the last year.

But the popularity of the free-to-play model among consumers does not mean that traditional ways of publishing are on a decline. In fact, whenever there’s a major release on console, either via traditional retail or digital channels, we observe a dip in free-to-play spending. Gamers, the data tells us, play on multiple platforms at once and regularly shift their focus between them, expressed in both time played and money spent. Innovative game mechanics and monetization strategies, it suggests, do not exist in a vacuum, but rather expand and add to the gaming ecosystem. How publishers differentiate themselves in such a volatile market has become a key strategic component.

And we're completely fooling ourselves if we think MMORPG's are the most popular MMO.