Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[Zojha]

I still think having a normal mode for Alex at all is killing any will to do Savage.

Personally, I still think the difficulty of savage is killing any will to do Savage. Far more people are willing to do NidEx than Savage for less rewards to boot, despite it having the same template as Savage - story content cranked up.
But then again, in our unofficial player poll 50% of the people weren't even interested in NidEx, so...yeah. If that's remotely representative, it doesn't take a genius to figure out hard content in general is just not considered fun by many.

[FoxyAreku]

90% of people I know (and I know around hundred) were 60-all (combat, gathering, crafting) 2 months after expansion release. So, what leveling? I'm not saying end-game is the only thing that matters, but what else is there to do? You can complete all other content in a few weeks, except maybe pvp, and be done with it. I honestly don't understand how some of you people play the game and still have stuff to do.

Meanwhile I know upwards of 200 people on this game and only like, 5 who are 60 in everything.

Heck I log in every day almost and have for 2 years and I still don't have 3 or 4 of the classes at 60. Not everyone wants to grind everything out as fast as possible. I spend most of my time crafting, raiding savage, or just being social, personally.

I find it really silly to grind everything out that you can in 2 weeks and then complain that there is nothing to do.

Neither here nor there though. I was just pointing out that it's obvious and should be expected that the majority of the playerbase won't be at endgame.

[Critical-Limit]

Personally, I still think the difficulty of savage is killing any will to do Savage. Far more people are willing to do NidEx than Savage for less rewards to boot, despite it having the same template as Savage - story content cranked up.
But then again, in our unofficial player poll 50% of the people weren't even interested in NidEx, so...yeah. If that's remotely representative, it doesn't take a genius to figure out hard content in general is just not considered fun by many.

I like hard content but not the way it's done in this game

And IMO having scripted fights that just take memorization and trial and error for crap glamour isn't worth it. Yes dungeons are scripted too, but at least the esoteric armor looks good.

Not everyone hates hard content. I like hard content. Imo it's the wrong kind of hard so I don't bother. That doesn't auto mean I hate hard content.

[KarstenS]

@Census:
Last time it was still a race between Shiva and Ragnarok for [...] the most alex clears

In this case it was a race with Odin. In Gordios Odin was leading the EU front. Now its Ragnarok. But 11 Faustlets are not much difference. We will get you

[Kai_Lee]

Midas is actually easier then gordias until A8S which is just a cluster F of overlapping mechanics. Even T9 which a lot agree is the hardest floor of the old coil is still easier then A8S. IMO

[Daemius]

blah blah gotta be in endgame to be active blah blah

Anyone paying a sub and doing so just to play LoV or hanging out in the GS playing minigames exclusively is still an active player. You don't have to be current on "endgame" content. That's the point of all the fluff content, if you don't want to raid you can do a million other things and still be considered part of the game. The game gets a lot more enjoyable when you realize that being on the bleeding edge of difficult content isn't necessary. I'm really enjoying just leveling all the jobs right now and seeing their stories

[Ibi]

Well, looks like the Midas clears are a bit better than the Gordias ones were (I'm remembering a 5%(?) clear rate for the Chocobo server in a similar survey).
I'm curious if there's any similar data for Coil back when it was endgame.

There's not an exact parallel, because neither BCoB nor SCoB awarded a minion or mount and FCoB awarded a minion to everyone who cleared it (rather than one minion per group per clear).

That said, in the April 2015 survey, there were ~36k T13 clears with an active population of ~730k characters, so a clear rate of ~5% after about six months.

Interesting: 3.3 has by far the biggest completion loss of all the MSQ phases - I blame Nidhogg and the endless fetch quest at the end.

It's pretty consistent from one survey to the next that the most recent MSQ segment sees a significant drop off.

Here's the comparable data from the April census:

FYI 500K active players(during a mid patch lull at that) is more than DOUBLE ff11's old daily numbers of 200k

From the 5th through 8th Vana'diel Censuses:

• 2005: "Based on data compiled at the end of March 2005, we conducted research on the main job levels of over 1,550,000 characters belonging to over 500,000 registered users."
  
• 2006: "There are over 500,000 players logging in to FINAL FANTASY XI from all over the world, with the main player base located in Japan, North America, and Europe."
  
• 2007: "FINAL FANTASY XI has steadily grown over the months and years into a thriving community of more than 500,000 users. [...] During any time zone, a significant percentage of the 500,000+ player base will be logged into the game."
  
• 2008: "FINAL FANTASY XI's thriving community has grown to more than 500,000 users."

You can quibble over the term "daily numbers" if you want to, but we don't have that data for either game.

What this consensus tells me is many people may get their wish of a return to Coil difficulty. I strongly feel the last stage of Alexander will be significantly easier than Gordias and Midas were. Hard to argue whether that is a bad thing though, what with how low the clear rates have been.

I don't think there was ever really a significant number of people who wanted something as difficult as even Midas Savage, especially compared to the number of people who were happy with Coil's difficulty.

They just spoke up about it, in some cases at length, while the people who were satisfied with Coil just went about doing Coil.

Add to that plenty of people went back into Gordias after getting either lore gear or beating any of A5S through to A7S and that likely accounts for the differences.

Yep, I know my static got at least eight mounts (I can't remember if we took other people through) from A4S some time after 3.2, so we're certainly bumping that number up.

Not that I disagree with the idea of multiple difficulties, or exploration based raiding; it should be noted that Savage difficulty does fit with the metrics of the highest difficulty raid in most MMOs. This could indicate that the formatting of FFXIV's raiding isn't indicative of its clear rate, but rather the problem is systemic to raiding and raid tuning itself at highest levels.

I think that once MMOs go to multiple raiding difficulties, the developers tend to intentionally design the hardest one so that only a small percentage of the players can beat it.

Midas is actually easier then gordias until A8S which is just a cluster F of overlapping mechanics. Even T9 which a lot agree is the hardest floor of the old coil is still easier then A8S. IMO

Definitely. I never did A4S without using the sac method or Savage SCoB, so I can't judge on those, but A8S is certainly more difficult than all of non-Savage Coil and all the rest of Alexander (including A3S and sac-method A4S).

[Teryaani]

Why? Because not everyone is interested in endgame that makes the game dead too? Or story? Or doing <insertxxxxcontent here>? There is many different things a player can do in this game - not everyone has to be interested in exactly the same things or doing everything available. Just because they choose to not do some form of content, does not mean this game is failing or is an accurate indication of player subscriptions. Hell, I dislike PvP and raiding, yet does that mean my sub is not to be countered in this? Because your arguement pretty much says because I don't do endgame it's therefore not important.

My wife and I haven't touched the storyline from Antitower on or anything endgame related (even the new 24 man raids) because of burnout. So you're right, this isn't an indicator of game death. We've been doing older content and short term events instead.

[Rikku1987]

Midas is actually easier then gordias until A8S which is just a cluster F of overlapping mechanics. Even T9 which a lot agree is the hardest floor of the old coil is still easier then A8S. IMO

I love A8s (have not cleared, @robo dance#2) and think its difficulty is perfect, it's the (currently) last turn and should be hard... and it's really fun
Too easy content is worse than too hard content imo, cause there's nothing left after clearing it. Gordias was much harder but mainly because of its DPS checks.. i still loved it (A3s).
Midas DPS checks are MUCH lower but more mechanic based, players asked for that .

Raiding fails because players don't want to join a static imo... We need to be able to join those fights without being in a static, Raid finder was a good idea but nobody uses it.. i hope a datacenter-wide party finder function will help once its implemented

[Alberel]

It's amazing what people view as successful games vs dead games these days. There has to be literal millions of people for players to think the game is thriving, despite the fact that your average MMO server will barely house 15,000-25,000 at a time TOPS. Thats literally all you need for your server to feel like it's exploding with people.

And if it's money concerns, I can't see that being a big issue either. 500,000 players paying 15 a month (minimum of $11 and maximum in the $20s with retainers) just for subs comes out to an average of ~$7,500,000 of sub money a month. That's not even counting people buying stuff off the Mogstation.

For real folks; even if these numbers are accurate, FFXIV is leaps and bounds above most of its competition out there. There may be probably 4 or 5 MMOs ahead of it in terms of numbers and income, on a bad day.

The game ain't dying. Let it go, like Elsa, and log in to have some fun!

Of the subscription MMOs that still exist I think it's actually second or third. 500k subs is actually really REALLY good for an MMO. Prior to WoW's existence the previous top-dog (Everquest) was hovering around the same number. WoW's success was a complete fluke simply due to making the genre relatively 'mainstream'. It's success will never be repeated, yet people continue to use it as a benchmark.

Honestly anything above 200k subs is fine for a healthy MMO if that number is relatively stable. People really need to stop thinking of WoW as the model of success. Business execs thinking like that is precisely why subscription MMOs have been struggling; they commit too much money during development expecting millions of subscribers that don't exist.