9/15 LuckyBancho Census (with UwU numbers)

[Kazgrel]

Well... no

Before FFXIV : ARR, we saw people from top world guilde doing the run to be world first on new raid. then nearly disappear for the game, just coming doing fast main daily things (when expansion has... not the case for most) and the weekly kill to have the stuff for the next raid. They have a really high play time for the first weeks and then, low... their game time go to others MMORPG or even other games.

Some people can do both FFXIV ultimate content, and mythic raid content.

Less a real thing with legion, M+ allow them to compete on wow 52 weeks a year. but not all do this (some just focus on loot with M+). A mythic raid is 20 people, only 8 is needed to do FFXIV content...

WoW and FFXIV are fightning each other on the "MMORPG with subscription" market. but many players does both. We can complain that FFXIV is empty. And probably FFXIV consume even less time than WoW. But it is not so hard to play both game... (just have to pay 2 time sub, but lets see people with 2 FFXIV or 2 wow sub... it is the same than 1 wow + 1 ffxiv sub)

The point I was trying to convey is that JP does not have WoW pulling away near as many players to it's raid scene, so they're more likely to concentrate on raiding here. I never said people can't play both (at a high level or in general). But the vast majority of those who are playing both are either NA or EU.

[DaulBan]

FFlogs report information;

Phantom Train
Statics*
956 O5S ranked JP statics.
1735 O5S ranked NA statics.
1006 O5S ranked EU statics.

Players**
106338 JP player rankings.
84698 NA player rankings.
43720 EU player rankings.

God Kefka
Statics*
678 ranked JP statics.
868 ranked NA statics.
469 ranked EU statics.

Players**
57930 JP player rankings.
25800 NA player rankings.
12750 EU player rankings.

Note * : This just counts the fastest instance of a group of 8 people uploading a log under a given static. It does not mean that there were different people in a static at a given time. This also means that one person can appear in multiple static rankings from the numbers I pulled.

Note ** : These numbers include all the unique jobs someone has run a given fight on and had a log uploaded. So if you played on WHM, AST, and SCH, and all three runs were uploaded, you'd be counted three times.

Anyways, just some data from fflogs to look at what it has to say about ranks. My kneejerk response to this is that it looks like proportionally way more people are trying out Train in JP. I don't think that train is a hard enough fight that assuming relative player skill is the same in both NA and JP that the clear numbers could be this relatively stunted without there just being more people on JP attempting the first fight. Alternatively JP players might be ranking on several different jobs. Most the raiders I know have ranks on Train on 5 different jobs, so the numbers for train may very well be inflated by a rather large number of people clearing that fight on basically whatever. I personally have cleared it on all jobs aside from RDM, MCH, and BRD so I'd count several times.

That said, with how many more people there are in NA and JP, even if the numbers are inflated by multiple alt jobs it's rather impressive that JP is ahead of NA. I'd personally say, though this is obviously obfuscated by the alt jobs thing, that JP has to be attempting the content more than anyone else.

As for guilds, there is one easy conclusion to draw: 70% of JP statics made it to Godka. Only 50% of NA ones did. Part of that is probably the already mentioned easy-awful strats that exist in NA, which means JP can clear with much larger margins for error than NA statics doing our pug strats do. The 20% differential is certainly interesting, and does lend some credence to the fact that JP progging strategies work better than NA or EU ones.

FWIW, luckybancho has the number of O8S mounts as 63,337. I might have counted wrong but in the neighbourhood of 60k is reasonable. The sum total of people on fflogs is around 95k with repeat entries, so these seem like fairly reasonable comparisons between # of people on fflogs and # of clears via mount.

[Marxam]

All this reads to me is that less people seem to have time to form statics and given how Savage is structured to be beaten in a week or less this doesn't surprise me. Though given the nature of UwU content where the top 1% gather you can imagine how hard it is to find people who share the same goals and skills. However, the shift to glamour based end-game is okay with me. Assuming the omega gear is good looking I might pug through it just like I did with Delta for that sweet Genji gear. Statics aren't a reality in my current state and while I would love to tackle Ultimate Bahamut for those crispy french-fried weapons I'll have to pass.

[xxvaynxx]

I'll quote myself from the reddit post.

"JP puts a higher priority on clearing even if it involves carrying bad players through. NA/EU are more concerned with FFlogs and are more likely to disband or leave if people perform poorly.

I can't speak for everyone else but I care about my fflogs a lot, mostly because I just like to compete with other players playing my job. That in itself is what make's raiding fun to me, apart from the fight alone.

[JackHatchet]

It's also possible that NA/EU players who enjoy raiding as their main focus of an MMO are playing the game that does raiding best--Warcraft.

Japanese people don't play Warcraft, so they're all FFXIV or bust, which certainly skews the numbers too. To be more fair you'd have to basically leverage the NA/EU's raiding community between WoW and FFXIV vs the JP raiding community which is basically FFXIV. And let's be real. WoW's NA/EU raiding population probably decimates JP's raiding population.

There's really no reason for a hardcore raider to want to play FFXIV aside from the limited edition Ultimate encounters. Just like there's no reason for a PvP player to play FFXIV over a PvP centric game.

----

It's jsut weird to compare NA vs JP for that stuff. It's like saying that JP people are better at riding bikes than Americans. Which may be true, but Americans don't waste their time with bikes when they have cars. Americans have Warcraft, so the NA population is divided heavily, because they have more options.

[ko_]

It's also possible that NA/EU players who enjoy raiding as their main focus of an MMO are playing the game that does raiding best--Warcraft.

Japanese people don't play Warcraft, so they're all FFXIV or bust, which certainly skews the numbers too. To be more fair you'd have to basically leverage the NA/EU's raiding community between WoW and FFXIV vs the JP raiding community which is basically FFXIV. And let's be real. WoW's NA/EU raiding population probably decimates JP's raiding population.

There's really no reason for a hardcore raider to want to play FFXIV aside from the limited edition Ultimate encounters. Just like there's no reason for a PvP player to play FFXIV over a PvP centric game.

----

It's jsut weird to compare NA vs JP for that stuff. It's like saying that JP people are better at riding bikes than Americans. Which may be true, but Americans don't waste their time with bikes when they have cars. Americans have Warcraft, so the NA population is divided heavily, because they have more options.

That may be true but you can still compare both fanbases of the same game and the results are the results. There's enough of a difference in requards to how we both take on raids for this to matter I feel.

[DaulBan]

snip.

I mean... maybe? But realistically if you play both games it shouldn't be hard to clear both raid tiers given that FF's are much shorter. Also, using the bike analogy, we're not really comparing people riding bikes to work vs people who drive cars, it's more 'how far do people get on average on their bike'. JP gets 20% further per bike ride than NA, which given that everyone is riding more or less the same bike indicates there has to be something about the JP bike-riding climate, routine, whatever that makes it so they get 20% further.

When it comes to WoW there's certainly a certain push to play one game over the other, though even so there are pressures on the JP side to play other games. Some people enjoy raiding but if it's not make or break for you it might be preferable to play another MMO like that DQ one that we never got. They could still get their difficult content or mmojrpg fix without stepping into savage. Options in any way reduce the likelihood of people going into savage content of any caliber.

At the end of the day, SE is the only one with the detailed meta-data to tell us what exactly is going on. Our data sets are incomplete, we don't know what sorta overlap WoW and FF have (you'd think if there was much we'd hear more comparisons than we do), and we don't know how many FF raiders switched to WoW permanently, etc etc.

[Alleo]

Didnt Yoshida also state in that one interview that the JP playerbase have a different view on content? Like if its there they want to clear it thus more people might try to clear raids unlike people in NA and EU. This could also be the reason why they did not give people a third Ultimate. Maybe too many JP players are still trying to clear the other two so that they did not need a third one? But that is pure speculation on my side.

I get the feeling that we western players just simply do the content that we like and not force ourselves to do savage content just to have everything done.

[KaldeaSahaline]

I'll quote myself from the reddit post.

"JP puts a higher priority on clearing even if it involves carrying bad players through. NA/EU are more concerned with FFlogs and are more likely to disband or leave if people perform poorly. For example, JP 2nd Forsaken strat is to have the two melee disengage completely and stack their puddles south, then fan out along the edge of the range puddle drops.

You'll never convince a NA/EU group to do that because uptime.

Another major factor is how JP typically views content. A lot of people there feel they should do it because it's available. It's one of the reasons we keep getting new leveling type content lately. A big complaint from JP is they have nothing left to level. Meanwhile, NA/EU won't touch things they don't care about.

Of course, this all applies to average parties. Plenty of JP players still push uptime and whatnot."

It isn't that NA/EU don't know how to beat raids or JP has an abundance of superior players. They simply approach it differently. Japanese culture is heavily group influenced. Someone lagging behind is the responsibility of the group as a whole. NA/EU, by contrast, is individualistic. If you make a mistake, you're impeding the group and continuous mistakes may lead to a replacement or disband. Many JP players have posted on reddit citing the number of players with Savage clears have no business getting said clears if based purely on skill.

Preface - I am not indicating you are right/wrong. I am curious though where this statement comes from?

What credentials do you have that allow you to state this so matter-of-fact? Do you speak/read fluent Japanese? Do you actively play on a JP server at a raid quality level?

I don't have any concrete data myself to draw a conclusion, but another poster did bring up competition (aka WoW), which is a very viable conclusion to arrive at based on logic, but not nearly enough to state as fact.

[JackHatchet]

I saw someone on the reddit post mention that the JP community's latency is really good.

Just think of how many of us NA/EU players have had a wipe due to a lag spike of 'one' of our members or our selves. And then realize that the JP players are all clustered around their servers. Where as the NA/EU players are often screwed over by having the servers in wonky spots. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor internet infrastructure played a role in all of this. Because there's probably a good chunk of players who d/c and say "go on without me!" Where as you'd probably never have those situations in Japan on the JP server--where it's all literally in the same region.

RIP east-coast players.