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

[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.

[Renathras]

WoW: Has no Steam tie-in. Has never had a Steam tie-in. Has its own launcher.

XIV: Has a Steam tie-in since 2014, roughly half a year after ARR's release.


So why would WoW players, who've never had any Steam integration, flock to Steam, while all other players of XIV (which has had Steam integration since the game's second quarter) would predominantly avoid it? And why, even, would players be more critical of XIV just because they'd played another MMO prior?

What even is the basis for this "probably"?

Basic logic and reasoning skills?

Suppose you've been a FFXIV player for a while - for the sake of this argument, we're JUST talking PC players. Like, for 5-9 years. Would you likely be playing on Steam or the SE launcher?

Obviously, the SE launcher, since FFXIV wasn't always for Steam.

But say you're a NEW player. Someone who just abandoned an MMO they've played for years, has heard about this competing MMO, and decide to look up how to buy it and get started? We're talking PC gamers here, so Steam is probably one of their first sources, especially whey they hear the FFXIV/SE website is a pain and a half to buy, register, and set up the game from.

So it makes logical sense to assume a lot of Steam players are people who just recently decided to get into the game and likely have a more "I just want to try it out" feel. That's certainly not an UNreasonable assumption. Whenever I want to try a new game that I just heard of but have no personal investment in, I check to see if it's on Steam myself. On the other hand, games that I've been playing longer or know someone who plays non-Steam, I'll often talk to them and install it the way they did, which is non-Steam.

But again, the onus is on you wanting to use the Steam numbers to address this and prove that they are valid to use, not on the people questioning you. Imagine if a scientific paper was published and the authors placed the onus of disproving it on the scientific community rather than them having to publish their data and explain why their data and experimental parameters were valid.

EDIT:


...and, of course, NOW I'll bring back the PS4/5 players into the mix. Hard as this might be to believe, there are a LOT of console gamers that do not have a gaming PC. These people simply never played WoW to begin with. The Playstation as a lineage of systems has also long been known as a system with an extensive RPG library. I remember back in the PS1/N64 days this conversation, and it was only cemented in the generation after that. These folks probably are not WoW refugees, and many may have FFXIV as their first ever MMO.

There is some overlap in some cases - some people do have consoles AND PCs that they game on - but it's not unreasonable to note that there are likely a lot of distinctions here as well.

.

The overall point stands that the Steam numbers are probably NOT a representative sample of all FFXIV's playerbase. You can make the argument they ARE, but you'll need some evidence and a rational argument backing it up. Not just "No, YOU prove they aren't!" or "Well...there's no reason that they wouldn't be..." as I've already pointed out reasons to think that the Steam sample wouldn't be representative.

[Divinemights]

A lot of players avoid steam version of FF14 like plague because since FF11 steam doesn’t play well with SE account system
I am not sure why WoW players think Steam can correctly represent the FF14 playerbase

[Shurrikhan]

Basic logic and reasoning skills?

Suppose you've been a FFXIV player for a while - for the sake of this argument, we're JUST talking PC players. Like, for 5-9 years. Would you likely be playing on Steam or the SE launcher?

Obviously, the SE launcher, since FFXIV wasn't always for Steam.

ARR released on August 27, 2013. It is now June 27, 2022, exactly 106 months later.
ARR released on Steam on February 14, 2014, less than 6 months after ARR's release.


For over 100 of the 106 months that XIV has been out (>94% of its lifespan thus far), XIV has been on Steam.

People would have had to have played in the first 5.5 months of the game's ever being released for Steam not to be an option. Not "5-9" years, but literally 8.3+ out of the game's total of 8.8 years' lifetime.

Meanwhile, for 0 of 213 months that WoW has been out, WoW has been on Steam.

So what is it about Steam-launcher users (or anyone who joined in the latter >94% of XIV's lifespan) that makes you think they are disproportionately more likely to be WoW players? (Let alone that anyone who touched WoW must have a more negative view of the game that would make their perceptions of XIV invalid and misrepresentative? Or that PC players would be significantly less appeasable than console players?)

[anhaato]

ARR released on August 27, 2013. It is now June 27, 2022, exactly 106 months later.
ARR released on Steam on February 14, 2014, less than 6 months after ARR's release.


For over 100 of the 106 months that XIV has been out (>94% of its lifespan thus far), XIV has been on Steam.

People would have had to have played in the first 5.5 months of the game's ever being released for Steam not to be an option. Not "5-9" years, but literally 8.3+ out of the game's total of 8.8 years' lifetime.

Meanwhile, for 0 of 213 months that WoW has been out, WoW has been on Steam.

So what is it about Steam-launcher users (or anyone who joined in the latter >94% of XIV's lifespan) that makes you think they are disproportionately more likely to be WoW players? (Let alone that anyone who touched WoW must have a more negative view of the game that would make their perceptions of XIV invalid and misrepresentative? Or that PC players would be significantly less appeasable than console players?)

This person always makes shit up, pretends it's true, and acts like they're smarter than you for "knowing" the shit they just made up. With the length of posts they write maybe they should find a different hobby in fanfic writing.

[Striker44]

ARR released on August 27, 2013. It is now June 27, 2022, exactly 106 months later.
ARR released on Steam on February 14, 2014, less than 6 months after ARR's release.


For over 100 of the 106 months that XIV has been out (>94% of its lifespan thus far), XIV has been on Steam.

People would have had to have played in the first 5.5 months of the game's ever being released for Steam not to be an option. Not "5-9" years, but literally 8.3+ out of the game's total of 8.8 years' lifetime.

Meanwhile, for 0 of 213 months that WoW has been out, WoW has been on Steam.

So what is it about Steam-launcher users (or anyone who joined in the latter >94% of XIV's lifespan) that makes you think they are disproportionately more likely to be WoW players? (Let alone that anyone who touched WoW must have a more negative view of the game that would make their perceptions of XIV invalid and misrepresentative? Or that PC players would be significantly less appeasable than console players?)

Just because something "existed" on Steam doesn't mean it was common to use it. Keep in mind when you go back 8-10 years, Steam wasn't viewed as an MMO source. If you wanted to play an MMO (WoW, Guild Wars, SWTOR, ESO, FFXIV, etc.), you bought it through the company and played it through the company's launcher. That was the norm. Steam as an MMORPG source just wasn't really a thing back then even if it technically existed as a way to play the game.

Add to it not only the length of time a person is likely to have played based on launcher, but add the type of gamer into the mix. Long-time RPG fans are more likely to use the company launcher. Meanwhile, WoW has become largely an eSports game in recent years, and guess where more eSports can be found...yep, Steam. A competitive eSports player is more likely to have other games on Steam and more naturally thus use Steam for FFXIV.

As someone else pointed out, the onus is on *you* to prove Steam would actually somehow be a representative sample of the playerbase. Because not only have you not proven that, but you've been presented with multiple pieces of evidence from multiple people showing why it is *not*.

[VelKallor]

WoW's pop fluctuates the exact same way FFXIV's does.

Um...as far as i am aware, FF 14 has never had more than 50% of its playerbase leave in disgust over less than a few months...add to that the WOD flight debacle that saw another 15% walk away.