Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[zosia]

XIV's population is awesome for a subscription game. I'd be waaaaaaaaay more worried about a F2P game with only 500k active players, lol.

The problem isn't the game's current population; it's the trend line showing that at this time next year, the active playerbase could be closer to 350k or 400k, which would then be cause for concern.

The population is going to skyrocket again when 4.0 launches, just as it did when 3.0 launches. The question is, can the devs do better this time at engaging and retaining players?

Let me spoil some things for you.

No, that was not a chocolate chip cookie, it was oatmeal raisin.
A wizard did it.
Wall-E ends up being ok.
And FFXIV will never break 1 million active subs again.

[Jynx]

I think one of the key factors this game is missing for a viable long term future is community building.

The game needs to be friendlier to larger communities, raiding and non raiding because as it stands cooperation with other people on your server is not required for anything at all. What is the incentive to be in a company other than the buffs and the people to talk to? The game needs to put more power behind the community, but sadly wont be able to do that if it wont risk letting players one man army the entire game up to the hardcore raiding stage that's pretty much dead.

[Instrumentality]

No, that was not a chocolate chip cookie, it was oatmeal raisin.
A wizard did it.
Wall-E ends up being ok.
And FFXIV will never break 1 million active subs again.

"World of Warcraft is just a casual person's EQ and will never be successful."

-People like you 12 years ago.

[Thayos]

And FFXIV will never break 1 million active subs again.

Did it ever? Why is that relevant to anything? This game doesn't need a million subs to be massively successful. Right from the outset, SE said 500k subs was totally sufficient.

[zosia]

"World of Warcraft is just a casual person's EQ and will never be successful."

-People like you 12 years ago.

except wow was new when people were saying that. This game came out in sep. 1 2012. This game is nearly four years old. Do you really think that there is going to be some 3rd renaissance to this game where it gains 500-600K+ subs?

[Kosmos992k]

It only takes you kosmos, you truly have a propensity to drag me out of lurking.

**snip**

Hi Zosia, well, I don'tknow about dragging you from lurking, though it's good to see your posts, and perhaps this will surprise you, but...

I do agree with a lot of what you are saying. There is one thing though I need to clarify as I think it has caused a misunderstanding. my use of the word insular. The point I was trying to get at is that static groups are mechanically insular. Not because the people in them are insular in their attitude, but because the entire point of a 8-person static in FFXIV is to run the 8-person raid content, and thanks to the earlier lock out policies statics groups had to maintain their cohesion. They are in that sense insular, they are isolated from other statics, and the game's own systems discouraged churn in static membership. The effect of that is that each static appeared from the outside to be insular, even though they were dealing with the hand the game dealt the players with respect to raid content. I did not mean to imply that players adopted an insular attitide or anything of that nature. My apoloogies for that misunderstanding, I simply did not choose a good word for thhe concept I was trying to discuss.

Oh, for the record, I liked the original difficulty of Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius, they were hard enough to be a challenge to be overcome. The lack of challenging 4 player content is one of the holes in this game, and one of the places so-called mid-tier stuff could be added - as you say as a stepping stone to real raiding.

I have no problem with the presence of raiders, raid content or raid exclusive gear whatsoever in this game. My only issue arises if the meta-game needed for raiding starts to pervade other content and pretty soon running dungeons as intended is considered super slow or just plain wrong, or for example, when the MOAR DPS mentality obliterates all other ways of gearing and playing. But that's really beside te point. I do think that raiding mayy be past it's prime simply because a lot of the long time raiders have had changes in their lives that restrict playing schedules. I smirk when I here of 48-hour long fights in FFXI because if anything like that was ever attempted in FFXIV it would very rapidly become content that is not run - people just don't have the time to dedicate to those things anymore. I take your point about the time needed - once the content has been learned and is on 'farm', but until that happens, there is a larger time commitment isn't there? Either way, It's an observation based on the aging gaming population's changing lifestyle and commitment to play. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that traditional raiding and strict static teams are past their prime?

Regardig A4S, no one should ever relerasr a fight in a game like this that has not been fully play tested to ensure balance. I've sugggested before that SE needs to have a small beta test team made up of people who ae not part of the Dev team or SE in order to gather more objective feedback. Fundamentally speaking testing your own code is a very poor way of seeing how it will perform in the real world.

At the end of the day, I want to see more challenges, more difficult, but not punishing content, lesssynchronized swimming, better gearing and slower gear progression, and above all fun content. Part of what makes things fun is the difficulty level. If there is content that we complete by the skin of our teeth, we'll talk about it in a positive way for a long time, if there is content that is too hard and feels like punishment until we memorize every step, it's unlikely to get much positivity even after it's cleared. For example, my son has several challenges that make it harder for him to play, but he still does well. My wife and I took him through Arum Vale before any nerfing there, and we got through with a single wipe, a friend of ours was the 4th and playing Bard like my son. But we really enjoyed the run ebcause it was hard for everyone, and he beat it because he was good. Everybody had a win. I like content that can run you close on completion because it pushes players to perform better and rewards them when they do.

Anyway, this is a good disucssion in this topic, I agree with most of what you said. For me this game will never be about raiding, but I love that my friends who like raiding haver that option, just as I'll be unlikely to PvP, but it's great that people who want to, can. Ideally all of the content should be engaging, and the difficulty set to be challenging without being simply punshing. Actually, what would be great would be 3 difficulty modes for light party content (with a slider to scale MOB levels like the Levequests, in addition to the mode setting); normal, hard and expert. The level and value of drops should increase with the difficulty level. 8-player content should retain normal and 'savage' modes but gain a more moederately balanced version in between the extremes.

Allowing people to run content on easy mode and then challenge it on high difficulty for better erwards would encourage people to play better. Keeping strict level sync and ilvl sync on hard and expert/extreme/savage content for at least a year before relaxing it would help improve longevity of content as well. No encounters should boil down to a mob filled corridor leading to a boss, multiple paths, secondary bosses and bonus rooms (and bosses) would spice things up and make for a more varied run.

Anyway, I don't know how to solve all the problems, least of all raiding. I was just observing based on the expereience of myself and my friends (many of whom raided in the past) and drawing a few conclusions. I think raiding needs to change to remain relevant to veterans and new players alike - if for no other reason than End-gamers are part of the active population, and we need an active population to keep the game vibrant.

[Alahra]

I definitely would have expected the Midas clears to be higher than they are. But I suppose AS8 is still a pretty big wall since it's so mechanically dense.

Active playerbase looks to be about what I expected going by play habits I've observed on my server at least. There's a definite downturn right now, and we're still dealing with the after-effects of Gordias in many ways, and the ripples that Midas didn't particularly do a lot to solve, either. Raiders may not make up a huge portion of the playerbase, but their presence does have effects on server populations and the like. As the population continues to cluster on a handful of servers, many others are going to dwindle and die out, making player retention difficult (since server transfers are not a suitable option for some players, for any number of reasons).

And of course, there are tons of high profile releases going on right now, too, which contributes.

[Ibi]

Raiding needs proper incentives. This 5ilvl weapon difference between 240 and 245 should be extended to all midan gear. There should always be a new savage mount, just like wow does for mythic. There should always be a new savage title, just like wow does for mythic. The BiS of one raid tier should help you in the next raid tier, just like in wow. The highest ivl in the game should only come from savage raids, just like mythic raiding in wow. The midan savage sets should look different from the normal models, just like how the models look different across normal/heroic/mythic raiding in wow.

We don't have a way to compare participation rates (because there's no way to get that information for XIV unless SE decide to tell us), but aren't the completion rates for Savage raiding in XIV extremely comparable to the completion rates for Mythic raiding in WoW, despite Mythic raiding having all these additional rewards that Savage doesn't?

[zosia]

We don't have a way to compare participation rates (because there's no way to get that information for XIV unless SE decide to tell us), but aren't the completion rates for Savage raiding in XIV extremely comparable to the completion rates for Mythic raiding in WoW, despite Mythic raiding having all these additional rewards that Savage doesn't?

So, your argument is that since clear rates are similar we should skimp on standard raid rewards in this game? Factoring in Heroic, since it's rewarded similarly to mythic, participation rates in wow raiding are higher than FFXIV raiding.

[Thayos]

So, your argument is that since clear rates are similar we should skimp on standard raid rewards in this game? Factoring in Heroic, since it's rewarded similarly to mythic, participation rates in wow raiding are higher than FFXIV raiding.

My takeaway from what he said is that the problem with low participation rates isn't rewards, it's that most people just don't find hardcore raiding to be fun, making rewards irrelevant.

I love XIV, but you couldn't offer a large enough reward to make me want to burn so much free time beating my head against the wall.