Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[Thayos]

You may find it counterproductive and pointless but without goals to stride for even casual players who would never even consider playing something like savage feel it.

No, that's not what I mean at all.

I feel like we're having two conversations here. I'm not participating in the discussion about how/why we should make things better for raiders. I'm trying to discuss how we can solve the big-picture issues of player retention. That's what this whole thread is about... examining the downward trend of the game's active playerbase and how we can reverse that.

My opinion is that diversifying endgame to engage the scores of players who have no desire to raid is a better use of resources than hyper-focusing on raiding, which seems to be what the devs have done thus far.

Raiding is a niche interest that will only ever really appeal to a niche group of players, regardless of rewards. Sure, those rewards are important to raiders. But no matter how good you make those rewards, raiding will still be irrelevant to the scores of players who don't like raiding. SE needs to do a much better job of engaging those players with new forms of true endgame content.

I don't see how we'll ever solve the issue of player retention until we address that critical big-picture issue.

[zosia]

No, that's not what I mean at all.

I feel like we're having two conversations here. I'm not participating in the discussion about how/why we should make things better for raiders. I'm trying to discuss how we can solve the big-picture issues of player retention. That's what this whole thread is about... examining the downward trend of the game's active playerbase and how we can reverse that.

My opinion is that diversifying endgame to engage the scores of players who have no desire to raid is a better use of resources than hyper-focusing on raiding, which seems to be what the devs have done thus far.

Were Primals, Void Ark, Diadem, Lords of Verminion, weeping city, aquapolis, three individual beast tribe quest hubs and palace of the dead not enough? That seems like quite a lot of casual oriented end game content to me.

Adding more of the same would not add the depth this game needs. People have been wanting more depth since launch and people were willing to look past those misgivings at the start of 2.0 because the game was freshly launched. The chickens are coming home to roost.

This game needs depth more than ever. Rewards should feel impactful and meaningful throughout the player strata because both casuals and raiders are needed in this game for it to be a healthy game. We only need to look at LotRO to see what happens to a game that dumps their raiding community.

It really does not matter thayos, this game is not wow, it will not rebound from losing so many players. At best, the dev team could stop the bleeding of subs, but we all know that the development pipeline of any game does not allow for fast action.

The game will continue to bleed subs for the rest of the expansion. The dev team will continue to stick to their formula, despite our feedback, causing 4.0 to seem very similar to 3.0 and 2.0. At that point, this game will be a repeat of FFXIV and no one will care about what rewards are where and how they are obtained, ithis game will be an obscure example of another MMO that was P2P going F2P.

[Ibi]

Why do you want raiders to feel short changed in this game?

I don't. I've never even said that I think the reward structure for raiding in this game is sufficient. I'd actually agree that effort:reward ratio for Savage is far too low, but that's not the point here.

We have people saying on the forums that raid rewards are not worth it. It's their opinion and it's not up for debate. They have a point when you look at what heroic/mythic raids provide players in wow. I feel the rewards are not worth it and you can contrast savage with mythic/heroic for that purpose. FFXIV raiders are treated like absolute garbage.

If it's just the rewards are the issue, please explain why A4S, which rewards a mount, had a clear rate more than order of magnitude smaller than Heroic Blackrock Foundry, which, as far as I can tell from Wowhead, had no mount, no title, no special quests, nothing that you couldn't get from Normal Blackrock Foundry.

You are simply taking two stats and saying that since they are the same, that rewards have nothing to do with the poor participation rates. Correlation does not equal causation here bud.

Nor is anecdotal evidence, which is all you're providing, but I know which of the two I'd put my money on to provide a better indication of the overall picture.

Raiding is a niche interest that will only ever really appeal to a niche group of players, regardless of rewards. Sure, those rewards are important to raiders. But no matter how good you make those rewards, raiding will still be irrelevant to the scores of players who don't like raiding. SE needs to do a much better job of engaging those players with new forms of true endgame content.

I don't see how we'll ever solve the issue of player retention until we address that critical big-picture issue.

This is exactly it.

Maybe SE could pull in some tiny sliver of players who don't like or enjoy raiding, but will do it if the rewards are ridiculously over-the-top good, but it's a such a small subset of the player base that it's not going to have any significant impact on the game as a whole.

SE's time would be much better spent making content that people want to do than trying to bribe them to do content they don't enjoy.