4.25 and beyond

[Sindele]

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

Also, being second-highest compared to WoW really shouldn't be viewed as successful in the year 2018. World of Warcraft dwarfs the number of subscribers for FFXIV, and it does so despite being roughly a decade-and-a-half old. That's sad, and it's a massive indictment of any company in the MMO space that isn't creating an intentionally niche title - SE first and foremost, given their shameless efforts to ape WoW early and often.

THIS, though, I have to call out as specious. Unless you have a magic line to both Blizzard and SE's real data, all you can go off of is the same inferential data everyone has access to.. which doesn't particularly agree with any estimates of 'dwarfing'.

Publisher numbers are, as a rule, complete and absolute nonsense. FFXIV claimed to hit 5 million subscribers in 2015, which is about as transparently unrealistic as Blizzard's old eternally optimistic subscriber numbers - there are a lot of real questions that have never been answered about how these numbers are reached, what really counts as an 'active' subscriber (there's a lot of reasons to suspect Blizzard's CN numbers in particular were always inflated), and how those numbers reflect in the real world. The observed estimates suggested a number of active player accounts somewhere in the 1.5m-2.5m range for WoW in mid-late 2017 - a pretty wide sweep, but getting there requires a lot of assumptions based on revising backwards from numbers of players seen online and Blizzard's own quotes about percentages of the player base that have completed content. A fun extra question is 'how many of those are propped up by tokens and would dissolve without paying players supporting them', but that's outside the scope of this discussion.

Now to FFXIV. The NA/EU/JP 'active characters' count from the censuses tends to hover around the 400k-600k mark - the high end for characters who are at least >50% through Stormblood, the low for characters who are caught up on the MSQ, based on different indicators. Alts are a thing in this game but much less of a thing than in WoW - so it's much more reasonable to draw an inference from that number. Let's assume - again conservatively, I suspect - that 75-80% of these active accounts are single-character. That gives us a baseline somewhere between 300k-500k, realistically somewhere around 1/6th to 1/4th the population. Smaller, yes, that was always a given, but 'dwarfing'? And that's certainly not a full count - how many non-RMT accounts are slowly chipping through the game, or roleplayers who don't put a priority on topping out? Hard to say. CN and KR are also operated by third party providers and I'm not sure if there are any unofficial censuses that include their data (please let me know if there are!).

In the MMO market, 'less than WoW' is not a failure - WoW is a colossal, unprecedented outlier that was guaranteed to live forever off of sheer inertia. Its like will - and I feel pretty confident saying this - never be seen again, barring some kind of equally completely unprecedented shift in MMO technology. Maybe the first real AAA brainjack-VR MMO. Maybe.

[Ayer2015]

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

No, taking a break isn't a bad thing. Keep in mind that if you unsub for an extended period you lose your house however. What I do think is an issue is being able to sub for 1-2 months out of a 2year patch cycle between expansions and really miss nothing. I mean, its great for those that are happy with the game as is... all the power to those people. The progression systems in this game a very weak in comparison to other games. The narrative is the strongest part of this game imo.

[Alleo]

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

I have two houses (FC and private) so I cant take a break. At least not a true break. I also find it a bit bad when the producer and director of a game says that its fine if people takes breaks...I mean shouldnt they give us content that stops us from going on breaks because breaks means no money for them? Also it kinda gives them a scapegoat..they can simply say: Just take a break its fine..instead of finding a way to keep people subbed most of the time.

Edit: I truly dislike the argument that people should only complain if they have done every single thing in the game..first that is probably truly impossible since a lot of achievements takes months/years to get..so if we take the argument that people cant complain about things getting stale if they did not have everything done, none of us would be ever allowed to complain and we kinda would have to accept if they gave us patches with nothing more than two dungeons and no other new stuff...since we had enough other achievements to do. Cards, orchestrion and things like that are normally side content and there to give people something to do next to the main thing that is fighting. (And maybe crafting) The problem is not that there are not enough small stuff to do that kinda turned into grinds too but that the fighting content is often really stale and if you are not a hardcore player that goes into Ultimate you will have less to do. Having the relic from the start or at least from 4.1 would have been a good way against this boredom since it was always content for the more casual players. Having it so late in the expansion which nothing new between that truly is bad. And since the relic seems to be completely locked to Eureka it also quite depends how well this content is..at least with the older relic weapons people had often other ways to get the stuff. Now it will only be one place that is completely away from the rest of the game..so you cant level up other jobs at the same time, run dungeons for tomes and achviements and so on.