We lost 70% of our player base half a year in

[ElysiumDragon]

Ah yes, Endwalker's launch, when we had queues in the several thousands, compared to now, where I STILL have to queue unless it's 3am.

Game's fine, if a bit dry for content at the moment.

[Liam_Harper]

If every WoW refugee leaves this game, it will still be popular enough to make money for Square Enix.

The only issue would be the large investment they've made into servers and hardware due to the rush of players on launch. If we lost all those players, that's wasted investment and a harsh loss. And really, Endwalker hasn't actually offered anything new or exciting to retain players, most things are pretty much the same as ShB.

The game will be perfectly fine, but at the same time letting a goldmine like the WoW exodus slip through your fingers is a rough blow for any business. Endwalker really needed to go big and be the best expansion yet.

Ah yes, Endwalker's launch, when we had queues in the several thousands, compared to now, where I STILL have to queue unless it's 3am.

The queues don't mean the servers are full. The game logs players into the game in batches. That's why there always seems to be a 20-50 person queue.

[DPZ2]

The game will be perfectly fine, but at the same time letting a goldmine like the WoW exodus slip through your fingers is a rough blow for any business. Endwalker really needed to go big and be the best expansion yet..

The game was doing fine before Activision/Blizzard blew up their WoW player base. A/B is doing things to bring them back. Not every WoW player will suddenly abandon FFXIV either.

Anecdotally speaking, I played both games side-by-side for four years, running from Warlords of Draenor through the first year of Battle for Azeroth for World of Warcraft and A Realm Reborn through Stormblood for Final Fantasy XIV. I lost interest in World of Warcraft. I remain subscribed to Final Fantasy XIV.

This isn't a zero-sum industry, where There Can Only Be One.

The influx of new players is very welcome. The sudden desire to "improve" the game by changing it to become more like WoW in order to "keep" those new players is not as welcome, mostly because the so-called WoW Refugees aren't the backbone of the FFXIV player-base.

[Raoabolic]

This isn't a zero-sum industry, where There Can Only Be One.

Tell that to the shareholders and companies that funnel resources to said game. I'm sure they would be more than happy to coexist, we should ask EB games or Hudson. :^)

[Shougun]

The influx of new players is very welcome. The sudden desire to "improve" the game by changing it to become more like WoW in order to "keep" those new players is not as welcome, mostly because the so-called WoW Refugees aren't the backbone of the FFXIV player-base.

These things, like.. a lot of things.. yee.. lol, always feel funny for me to read because maybe there are sometimes "make it exactly like WoW x y z" but other times, most of the time, I see this for things that are just plain good ideas.

"Lets at least have as good a glamour system as WoW", and things like that I see a lot here. Maybe rarely I'll see something that isn't clearly as 'good' like some people like borrowed power system, but I almost never see that.

Yet I see lots of "don't make it like WoW" and it leaves me scratching my head like where are the pit of bad WoW ideas that people seem to be seeing a lot, that I tend to only see the "BEST" from WoW being suggested here. Why the heck wouldn't I want glamour log upgrades? Why the heck wouldn't I want upgraded Garrisons (if they did it to our current Garrison GC system, or if Island Sanctuary), of course I want instanced housing system (but if they did Garrison right then sure why not- it wasn't bad content miss a few key, fairly large, missteps by Blizzard).

"Don't make it like WoW!" and, for the most part, I only see either neutral or actual /fantastic/ ideas suggested from that game.


Maybe someone might be like "I get we don't want race racial abilities because the whole FFXIV game is play how you want, but can we get a bit more character on our jobs?"
'don't make it like WoW' ...? Is there literally no flavor we can do to the game? I find that really hard to believe, especially given we're at the most homogenized state of the game. To which I even suggest non-combat flavor as a easy way to dodge that reason for not doing it.



I think it's fair to like the game as it is, but sometimes I see stuff like that and immediately think 'wot?' lol. Now for your post I don't know the context of what you're thinking of, just in general I'd say /most/ of those situations are for things that are generally very well received and due to the similarities of the game could very well easily argued to fit FFXIV (like glamour log upgrades).

Perhaps I only click on the threads I find interesting, and generally ignore the other ones.. Selection bias /shrug ?

[GeminiReed]

The game will be perfectly fine, but at the same time letting a goldmine like the WoW exodus slip through your fingers is a rough blow for any business. Endwalker really needed to go big and be the best expansion yet.

What exactly did you expect them to be able to do? By the middle of last year EW was probably pretty much feature complete. They might have been able to squeeze in something minor but I'd be shocked if they had the flexibility to rearrange the existing schedule much less add something major. I fully support complaints that some of the longer term content should have been introduced earlier but a scheduling decision like that was probably made in 2020 if not earlier.

I think XIV retained as many ex-WoW players as it would have anyway.

[Ransu]

The only issue would be the large investment they've made into servers and hardware due to the rush of players on launch. If we lost all those players, that's wasted investment and a harsh loss. And really, Endwalker hasn't actually offered anything new or exciting to retain players, most things are pretty much the same as ShB.

The game will be perfectly fine, but at the same time letting a goldmine like the WoW exodus slip through your fingers is a rough blow for any business. Endwalker really needed to go big and be the best expansion yet.

WoW's pop fluctuates the exact same way FFXIV's does. Most people simply don't stick around in between patches and come back when there's new content.

[Lauront]

The only issue would be the large investment they've made into servers and hardware due to the rush of players on launch. If we lost all those players, that's wasted investment and a harsh loss. And really, Endwalker hasn't actually offered anything new or exciting to retain players, most things are pretty much the same as ShB.

Yup, it's something LB remarked on today as well when he was analysing the figures from the recent survey here.