Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[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.