Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[Thayos]

Then you shouldn't say none of these rewards are that hard to get in the first place.

I completely stand by my earlier statement. Not because it's 100 percent correct, but because this is a big-picture conversation, and I'm obviously speaking in generalities as to be more relevant for the majority of players.

The raid community is a small niche group of players. It's silly to let the most difficult rewards for this niche group impact the shape of the larger discussion on how to better retain players. Most people who play this game will never be raiders, so to focus on the raiding community is both counterproductive and pointless.

[Jynx]

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.

Nothing to aspire for.

[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.

[Istaru]

First, I did a poor job in my quoting and responding to you, I apologize.

We're clearly talking about before the proverbial elevator is installed. If you've been following this conversation, you would know that.

We both are actually, knowing that the elevator is coming and what it does has an effect on how some people approach many things in this game.

Everyone knows that the elevator comes with every even numbered patch. We also know the each patch is roughly 100-110 days from the last one.

I know people who skip out for long periods of time because of the elevator. Some of them are people who used to stay constantly subbed and eventually came to the conclusion that challenging content as it is currently delivered is a waste of their time. They can come back 6 months to a year later and clear everything in a short period of time and bounce out again, normal mode or EX or savage doesn't matter.

I doubt removing story mode or making them unique glamour will change that behavior. And the way they play does have an effect on the subscriber numbers we would see in a report like this one. I think part of it is the raid normal mode, part of it is the lack of unique rewards from the savage raid, lack of long term goals, lack of long lasting content of an appropriate difficulty, part of it is a very lackluster raid story, a lack of difficulty in most of the game outside of raiding and part of it is the elevator effect. I think it is all of them together.

I think for each and every one of us, we will rate an item on that list higher or lower or add and subtract from it based on our own experiences. I don't think any one here is wrong, I think collectively, we are correct.

[Tolmos]

Jfdgugcdgb

I second this!

[Thayos]

Were Primals, Void Ark, Diadem, Lords of Verminion, weeping city, aquapolis, three individual beast tribe quest hubs and palace of the dead not enough?

Except the only thing in this entire list that counts as true endgame is Primals... and Primals are really just single-floor raids. They're heavily scripted eight-man fights with extremely punishing mechanics that are only efficiently tackled by statics.

All that other stuff you mentioned is irrelevant to everything we're talking about here.

This game needs diversified endgame content that is accessible by groups of different sizes. We need content that really capitalizes on the game's FC and LS social structures. We need content with a gate that differs from "repeat this until you memorize it."

We need this because, as the data plainly shows, most players are not raiders. They will never be raiders. SE can't entice people to play this game long-term if the only real endgame content is raiding.

That's why I'm not discussing how we should be making raiders happy. It's not that I don't want raiders to be happy -- the presence of raiding is fine by me, and I'd rather have SE make good raids than bad raids -- but that's not super relevant to the big-picture topic of how to improve player retention.

It really does not matter thayos, this game is not wow, it will not rebound from losing so many players.

This game will get a huge slug of players at 4.0, just as it did at 3.0. Nobody expects this game to ever break 1 million active players, but the population will definitely get a nice influx. And the devs will have another chance to better retain that influx of players. And they need to figure it out, because with each expansion they'll have less of an influx to try to retain.

But that doesn't mean it's time to panic. Yoshi-P has said in the past the game could survive just fine on 500k subs. So if they can figure out how to engage more players, then the game will be fine.

[Chalbee]

Consumerism!

I am fully aware that we live in a consumer-centric world, and while I don't meditate on a mountain top, I find no joy in lording my accomplishments over others. My joy in my accomplishments comes from that fact that I did it, not in that fact that others have not done it.

I wonder why your enjoyment of x is nullified by more people having it. As someone else pointed out, schadenfreude should not be necessary to enjoy something. If you really feel the need to whip it out and measure when you see someone with the same item as you, just mention that you got it when it was still a pain in the ass. But really, if your sense of accomplishment is dependent on being better than others, I don't have the right credentials to help with that...

[zosia]

I am fully aware that we live in a consumer-centric world, and while I don't meditate on a mountain top, I find no joy in lording my accomplishments over others. My joy in my accomplishments comes from that fact that I did it, not in that fact that others have not done it.

I wonder why your enjoyment of x is nullified by more people having it. As someone else pointed out, schadenfreude should not be necessary to enjoy something. If you really feel the need to whip it out and measure when you see someone with the same item as you, just mention that you got it when it was still a pain in the ass. But really, if your sense of accomplishment is dependent on being better than others, I don't have the right credentials to help with that..
.

I think you are being a bit hyperbolic. You don't have to rub an achievement in someones face to appreciate it's rarity. You are making a false equivalency. Just because I might appreciate having something that a lot of people don't does not mean I have to obnoxiously rub it in someone's face. It's nice to have something rare, a hard earned reward from a path few will follow.

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.

It's a big part of the point. The raid rewards sucking is the same pattern dragging down the rest of the game.

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.

Because a4s is the worst designed raid fight of this game. The dev test team could not even beat the fight in it's entirety. They only play tested the fight in parts. Not to mention how bad a3s was for most groups. It's a complicated problem, but I can tell you I have had to replace a half dozen raiders over the last year and a half that thought raid rewards in this game were not worth the time investment. Call it anecdotal if you like, but frankly I don't care. Raiders have been talking about savage and poor rewards since the expansion started and they have been leaving in droves for other games. They leave for many reasons, but poor rewards is definitely among them and splitting semantic hairs will not invalidate how raiders feel under rewarded in this game.

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.

What exactly do you want? Was the scores of casual content from LoV, Aquapolis, Diadem, Alex normal, PoTD etc etc etc not good enough? Are two 24 man raids a year not enough? Hunts, yokai watch, seasonal festivals... This game has casual content wall to wall.

lol, your idea is what we have in this game is now and it's a big flop.

Except the only thing in this entire list that counts as true endgame is Primals... and Primals are really just single-floor raids. They're heavily scripted eight-man fights with extremely punishing mechanics that are only efficiently tackled by statics.

All that other stuff you mentioned is irrelevant to everything we're talking about here.

This game needs diversified endgame content that is accessible by groups of different sizes. We need content that really capitalizes on the game's FC and LS social structures. We need content with a gate that differs from "repeat this until you memorize it."

We need this because, as the data plainly shows, most players are not raiders. They will never be raiders. SE can't entice people to play this game long-term if the only real endgame content is raiding.

So, then what do you want more of? VA? Weeping City? Here is the thing, you want content that capitalizes on communication devices like FC and LS but you want content that also requires no progression. We already have that in fates and in hunts. Really, hunts are exactly what you are describing, but hunts are also some of the worst gameplay in this game.

You know what made dyanamis fun? It was a challenge, it was heavily progression based. You didn't just get to fight dynamis lord, you had to work up to fight him. This Game is void of any of that depth. HOw fun would dynamis had been if the monsters could never kill you, you always made it to the last boss on time, and you could repeat until you got loot that week?

This game has no depth, it never will, and that's why it can't retain players. This game caters to the casual non-raiding community like no other game in the industry. Virtually all the content in the game is designed with you guys in mind. It does not work and that is reflected in the sub numbers.

That's why I'm not discussing how we should be making raiders happy. It's not that I don't want raiders to be happy -- the presence of raiding is fine by me, and I'd rather have SE make good raids than bad raids -- but that's not super relevant to the big-picture topic of how to improve player retention.

And that's the problem, you claim to be looking at the big picture, but you are not looking at the big picture. If we are talking meaningful progression content and rewards for casuals, what makes you think SE can even meet that need when it can't meet that need for raiders? That's the problem, The vertical progression latter has been broken in this game since 2.0 launch, it's just more exaggerated at the top (savage). Just look at the ilvl of the 24 mans, it has always seemed backwards. Why is new content rewarding items of inferior ilvl? Look at niddhog ex. He had no 240 accessories, only ilvl 235 glamour weapons. Niddhog Ex rewards were literally for alts or for players who did not raid or have a relic.

If you want this to honestly be fixed, the entire latter (big picture) has to be reworked from top to bottom. For there to be meaningful progression and rewards for casual non raiders players there also needs to be meaningful progression and rewards for raiders. There always needs to be more for players to strive for or envy. Even raiders, players who clear all the content, still chase parses and 7-man clears. There always needs to be a chase, for both groups and this dev team does not deliver on that for a multitude of reasons.

This game will get a huge slug of players at 4.0, just as it did at 3.0. Nobody expects this game to ever break 1 million active players, but the population will definitely get a nice influx. And the devs will have another chance to better retain that influx of players. And they need to figure it out, because with each expansion they'll have less of an influx to try to retain.

But that doesn't mean it's time to panic. Yoshi-P has said in the past the game could survive just fine on 500k subs. So if they can figure out how to engage more players, then the game will be fine.

Just take a look through my post history and see how many times my predictions about what savage was doing to the raid community came true. This game is not going to rebound. Yoshida is going to have to fight tooth and nail for those 500k active subs to keep this game viable. One more bad expansion like heavensward and this game is done. At least I get to say I told you so a lot. F2P is just around the corner.