New Lucky Bancho Census 12/1/17

[Pomelo]

Because Japanese people can play Dragon Quest X is why there are more Westerners. We only have FFXIV to play, where the JP players can play the better MMO DQX .

This.
I would much prefer DQX, I think that's why they fear localizing it, because it would mean lapse in subs here.

[basketofseals]

Honestly I wasn't saying that. Were some of those losses due to raiding? Probably. But I bet it also had to do with the rise of other mmos like ESO, XIV, Tera, and others.

But yeah most people do not want to raid. Jump in, jump out, raids aren't built like that, if the content is challenging enough that pugs struggle, it becomes a bane to form groups. Even the best games don't stay played forever, eventually most want something new.

None of the MMOs you mentioned had a release date from around that time. The closest one is ESO, but WoD was released 6 months after. WoW was on a slow decline, but it was a very predictable and steady decline until WoD which jumped off a cliff.

Also LFR raids were just like that. They were split up into 3 nice wings that you could easily jump in and out of. You could complete each wing well under an hour, and mechanics were mostly ignorable.

[Claviusnex]

Games that cater only to raiders - yeah, that can easily cause the game to die. However catering to raiders is not wrong as such, as long as a reasonable amount of resources also go to development of content that non-raiders can do.
While raiders are a small minority of the population, they do tend to be a fairly important and active part of the population so neglecting them can also cause a game to die.

Which is why games like FF XIV and WoW have tourist modes for their dungeons and raids. They realize that it is the large casual player base that largely pays for the higher level raids catering to the more serious player. You do need both as the higher level players are generally the ones who generate the hype and provide the exposure to grow the player base. Not an easy balancing act but I think SE has done a reasonable job with FF XIV.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Always interesting to see these pop up and read the evaluations of the data.

...
There a center between hello kitty and super savage extreme murder monstrosity<insert x game here>.
...

"Hello Kitty Chainsaw Massacre"?
;P

[Cakekizyy]

Well there's WoW: Warlords of Draenor that managed to lose nearly 5 million subscribers in 6 months. Anyone who played then can tell you any feature outside of raiding received criminal levels of neglect.

It is definitely possible to focus too hard on the most visible minority, because within a month over 80% of of players, that is to say the players that weren't interested in even the easiest version of a raid that has a difficulty of easier than an extreme primal, had absolutely nothing to do. WoD lost nearly a million subscribers a month of a good reason.

Part of it was also dev arrogance over flying issue.

[Dzian]

Wildstar showed that hard doesn't save games. That game was really hard, and it died too. .

Going back a bit now one of the bigger issues wild star hard that caused it to fail was that yes it tried to do the old school hard-core content and that's something players were actually excited about and wanted . But wildstar then combined that hardcore content with the vertical gear treadmil model with cheap unsatisfying rewards. And thus like every other vertical mmo players basically said feck it. The lootis junk and just doesn't justify the difficulty. And with the vertical progression the challenge of content doesn't last either which in turn removes prestige from clearing it.

Which is exactly the same reason many people just don't bother with raiding in 14.

As for XI nostalgia. I'm actually very realistic about that.
Yeah some of XIS elements were terrible and wouldn't survive today's world. 4 hour sessions of dynamis, 3 hours of twiddling your thumbs for hnm gods to pop, those things weren't great I admit.

But the reality was a lot of XIs content was a lot more casual and accessible to even the most part time gamers.
Einherjar was 30 minutes once or twice a week.
Limbus was an roughly an hour once or twice a week.
Nyzul isle, assault, salvage etc etc all of them you were looking at roughly an hour. It was far from the life consuming torture many people made it out to be.
Even the dream worlds dynamis zones 90 minutes or so at most.

Hnms and dynamis were probably the largest time sinks. Everything else was actually fairly casual in the amount of time you needed.

[Reinha]

Part of it was also dev arrogance over flying issue.

It was hilariously stupid. If we remove beast tribe daily quests, new max level dungeons, hunts, ex primals, maps, tomestones and new jobs from this game and let the only content be squadrons, max level FATEs and raids... that was Warlords of Draenor until the second major patch (a year or so). And the devs' reasoning for keeping flying out was: "you'll enjoy the FATEs more!"

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I don't understand why I'm being argued against. This is the point I'm also making. I'm not running on insane troll logic and trying to say releasing quality raid content is a bad thing in a vacuum, but focusing on that entirely can be to the detriment to the game as a whole as it's not a feature most of the playerbase has a vested interest in.

Were you just making a general statement? I interpreted your reference to Warlords of Draenor as WoW losing subscriptions based primarily on their raid being too difficult, hence the comparison. If that wasn't the case, my apologies.

The first part I find weird, while I agree with the second part. It is not like teenagers and young adults stopped existing as we got older and moved on from 11. Their are still age groups with the same if not more time to waste on entertainment/social endeavors. Also mainstream should mean that the pool is much larger to draw people with free time.

They aren't the target demographic is more what I mean. Games are designed nowadays to keep young adults and adults entertained because they have far more disposable income but less time to decide towards exceedingly long grinds. As for the pool, it's actually shrunk since people have more choices between which MMO they'll invest their time into. You didn't have the multitude of F2P you see now. It's partly why WoW will never be dethroned.

[Alleo]

Well seeing the numbers it seems that SE needs to start listening more to the other fans outside of Japan. The playerbase in NA is already bigger than the Japanese one but adding NA and EU together really shows that we should not be forgotten.

[CosmicKirby]

I don't understand why I'm being argued against. This is the point I'm also making. I'm not running on insane troll logic and trying to say releasing quality raid content is a bad thing in a vacuum, but focusing on that entirely can be to the detriment to the game as a whole as it's not a feature most of the playerbase has a vested interest in.

Because the original post in the chain isn't just blaming the dev's for making content aimed at a relatively small % of players. It's blaming the players that content was made for, which is insane.


MMOs are strong because they provide a wide breadth of content in a social atmosphere, they're considerably weaker if they lose some of all of that breadth on focus on only a few things.

There are MMOs with really good pvp and nothing else, they die off.
There are MMOs that had really good raids and nothing else, Wildstar is dying off.
There are MMOs with no real raids and are just social or glamour based, most honestly fall into this, look at any number of Korean MMOs or even social MMOs like second life or VR chat.

Warlords of Draenor had a TON of problems. The fact that the only actual good parts of the expansion, the leveling and raids, were the only good parts doesn't mean one gets to blame raiders. That expansion was aborted in so many ways it begs to be forgotten. It underwent an entire re-write from a story perspective one patch through, it's a time-travel to an alternate dimension side story that had literally ONE plot point carry over into the future game before it was forgotten, an entire raid tier was cut out for a poor fascimile of 'player housing' that resembles a mobile game, features advertised on the freaking box were cut. (So even THEN, the claim that 'raiding killed Warlords' is a horrible cherry pick of a statement, because an entire raid tier was cut for other non raid content, and it also ruined the story with it as well. The entire second act of story in Warlords is gone and the 3rd act was hastily re-written to fit this decision.)

Comparing anything that isn't near brand-suicide to Warlords isn't doing justice to how bad Warlords was.


So in short, I don't blame any player for wanting content that caters to them, that's fine. But don't go blaming raiders for wanting content they want, claiming it kills the game, and then back off and say, "What? You're agreeing with me see! Only one kind of content is bad!"