IGN Brazil Asked Yoshida about 2 min meta

[Payadopa]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. People have the right to curate their groups however they want. Besides, it's still going on. Meta will always exist, and there's nothing SE can do about it without dumbing things down to the point they kill the game.

There is a lot wrong with this. You said so yourself. But people can't help themselves. All the more reason to adhere to a vision and not to the whims of the people who yell the loudest if the rest of the game suffers.

[Arkdra]

Generally revenue declining and data indicating players are not active combine to mean subscriptions are down. Unless you want to say the MMO part of SE is down due to people not spending in the shop which is an lol argument you can have, I don't really care. The truth is no you won't see a source because even if SE straight up said it you'd find some excuse.

Additionally you can other insights such as Steam, Twitch to see engagement is down. Some part of this is post pandemic effect but the point is that EW is failing to keep people.engaged.

Not really, no. Like sure, revenue is down, that is not a surprise. It would be more surprising if it weren't. With the singular exception of WoW shitting the bed so hard it hemorrhaged players over here at the end of Shadowbringers, we are in the expansion patch period where people have quit and are waiting for the next expansion. You need to show not just that subs have dipped but that they've dipped significantly harder in proportion to any of the other expansions. Which, as best as we can tell from Lucky Bancho's survey a few months ago, is simply not the case.

ARR lost about 31% of it's playerbase when comparing the peak count versus the deepest valley.
HW lost approximately the same.
SB also lost approximately the same.
SHB lost 32% before the wow exodus occurred and boosted the numbers into the stratosphere. But you can't exactly expect your biggest competitor to fuck their expansion so hard that their biggest streamer quits and drags like 500k people into our loving embrace to be a regular occurrence.
EW as it currently stands has only lost 24% of it's subscribers. And that valley hit back in august 2022 and the sub numbers went UP after that, then dipped lightly and then began trending back up very slightly.

So no, using the best methodology we have, you cannot really sit here and be like GAME'S DYING without posting some comparable data to back it up. If anything EW is their most successful expansion when it comes to retention, so far. Well, retention not the best word necessarily, more accurate to say the best at maintaining it's sub count. Theres some interesting retention info in the reddit post I've linked below, but without similar data for the other expansions, nothing to draw from it other than it being of mild interest.

Although if I were a betting man, I would bet 20 bucks that by the time Dawntrail is set to come out we'll be back down to.... 31% of players lost. I may go a little further to 35% because the content drought is gonna be REAL after 6.55 in January. Hell, it may be real mid November. But "players quitting because there hasn't been new content in months" is an entirely different cause than... whatever you are trying to blame a nonexistent exodus on in this thread, presumably the 2 minute meta. Oh and homogenization? Forum classic.

Source: Active Players Chart (2014-2023) courtesy of /u/Darrcyphfeid: https://imgur.com/fHBrFWIm which I got from https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...3_139m_active/.

sidenote: shoutouts to patch 5.3, the GOAT patch that managed to top the shb expansion launch peak just slightly. What a legend.

[Jeeqbit]

they will probably quote you the one graph folks are tossing around to 'prove' XIV is dying.

That graph showed veteran players were leaving (and we don't know if that is even permanent). This graph did not show how new and returning players are making up for the loss of veteran players, so overall, there is no decline. In fact, the latest Lucky Bancho statistics prior to the patch show that there was an overall increase in active players!

Generally revenue declining and data indicating players are not active combine to mean subscriptions are down.

Lucky Bancho is a pretty good source because they have themselves tested their own data against SE's when they have accidently slipped their subscription numbers. At one point, they estimated around 15% were alts and then as many as 20%. This was before data center travel, which reduced the need for alts. Even if the stats are inflated by 20%, the Lucky Bancho data has been pretty stable the entire expansion.

I would argue the game will likely not die come 7.0, it is just unlikely for this to happen then.

Correct. It takes a good 5-10 years for the decline slope to actually occur. This is especially the case for an MMORPG with over 20 million accounts, which is a pool where, even if hundreds of thousands of people quit, they will simply be replaced by some of those 20 million accounts who are returning players from years ago. We need to understand that no matter how burned out people get, those new and returning players ain't and they will keep the game alive for years regardless of how veterans feel.

That's why the stats have shown collector/veteran type players leaving, yet the new and returning players mask this completely. What are the chances many of those veterans will eventually return like they kept doing with WoW? Pretty high, let's be honest.

[Connor]

At the very least I really hope they break things up more between 30/60/90 sec cool-downs instead of making it all 120s. Playing “support-oriented” jobs like Bard and Dancer sucks because the so much of what’s supposedly the draw of the job (‘supports party’), is just a 10-15 second every 120 seconds. Then you go back to just being a really low dps again lol

[Darkpaw]

I mean no matter what way you slice it the two minute meta is more limiting than freeing especially from a development standpoint. New jobs will play atleast remotely similar to existing jobs because existing jobs all play remotely the same because they all have to fall into this 2 minute cycle. So now that all jobs are fundamentally the same due to this meta, fight design has to revolve around that 2 minute meta and fights become... predictable and same-y.

That's just a fact. There's not a lot you can do when you have to have a mini burst window at 60 seconds, a big burst at 120 seconds. This isn't just about hardcores vs midcores and casuals. This meta is fundamentally changing how the game is designed because the player base a long time ago, got it in their head that synced burst windows would be better without fully thinking about the ramifications of what they were asking. Now we're in it, we see what the fall out is and people don't like it whether they realize this is the cause or not.

People complain about job homogenization. What caused it.. 2 minute meta.
People complain fights aren't as interesting as they used to be. What caused it.. 2 minute meta.

And this thing about PLD and MNK in Heavensward. Yes, Heavensward was not perfect and yes there was a clearly "defined" meta but PLD and MNK could still clear the content they just had to work a little harder at it and that isn't always a bad thing unless it's always the same 2 jobs getting locked out. The "toxic meta" was a community problem not a development one. If people stopped putting so much emphasis on what's "Meta" and just worked on their skills they could have cleared content just fine back in heavensward (minus pre-patched Living Liquid but that's a whole other beast)

Having a meta is great for the hardcore min-maxers that want to squeeze out every drop of DPS, but so long as every comp can clear the content provided, whether it be the most efficient way or not is all that matters. I cleared A9-A12s with a group that was hardly meta. Including a pld and dark combo, and a double melee comp. Sometimes catering to the masses is the wrong choice. In my opinion and I'm no hardcore raider or anything like that (haven't raided in years). This 2 minute meta has done more harm then good, and should be abandoned for more freely creative job design and fight design. Let us figure out how it all goes together. And let us hold ourselves responsible for not worshipping the "meta" like there's no other way to do content.

[reginleif-]

I suggest reading more articles to get a better view of the coming DT content. Coincidentally, I have this Famitsu article from a few months back where they were mentioning adding a new type of battle content and/or more exploratory content like Eureka and Bozja. It's in Japanese and the Google English translation is...rough, to say the least. Link: https://www.famitsu.com/news/202307/30311422.html

This article has an English version :) The illustrations are different, but the text is the same: Naoki Yoshida Answers Questions From the Press at Fan Fest 2023

The article is long to scour, so I quote here the answer about new battle and exploratory content:
“Of course, we continue to discuss and ideate on different content that we’ve never done before in terms of battle content. In terms of large-scale combat situations like Bozja and Eureka, we still want to do things in that vein as well. So we’ll continue to come up with new challenges in that aspect.”

No promises to bring it in Dawntrail stated here, sadly.

[SieyaM]

Casual players always blame raiders and raiders always blame casuals for this, and the reality is probably somewhere in between. I can remember a lot of changes being made specifically because of the more intense players constantly complaining about balance, not that content couldn't be cleared with some jobs as they were but that some jobs were doing more damage than others and it was seen as unfair when jobs were parsed and ranked by DPS. AST is one I remember most clearly because the changes to the cards were made pretty directly in response to certain people complaining that balance was the only useful card and AST had to fish for it to satisfy group parses and get the highest DPS ranks on certain sites. Nothing about the previous function of cards prevented people from clearing, and in fact the highest parse for BRD at the time this was going on was when they were given spear cards, which increased crit rate. All this to say that yes we are in the state we are because of player feedback, whether that be casual or raider who can say definitively.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Honestly the more I dig into this issue and read older stuff the more I realize why people think Margrat is a stand-in for the devs.
I don't like the direction the game takes in regards of just releasing and dumping content without making it accessible to newer players, but heck, I'm sure if they removed stuff like the 2 minute meta you'd have people moaning about whatever solution was implemented and try to squeeze the fun out of it for the sake of DPS performance.



Although I agree with you, people would then proceed to gatekeep whatever classes have the best individual performance, which happened before in GW2. I don't know if you were there when you couldn't play a Necromancer in Fractals with random people because of the class performance despite content being completely clearable with all sorts of class combinations. There's no real solution to the meta mindset.

FFXIV's GCD is so slow there wouldn't be much disparity between top and bottom, just like there is now. In GW2 you still have gatekeeping and meta, largely because either classes are too versatile as support (FB, Mech), or just have far too low of skill floor and easily spew out DPS on even the most casual player (Virtuoso, and again Mech).

FFXIV really doesn't leave as much room for a gap between skilled and nonskilled play as GW2 does, as long as you always be casting. In GW2 the difference can be on the order of a magnitude, so obviously class choice and build matters for unskilled players. FFXIV generally doesn't allow players to fail as much. We wouldn't see gatekeeping nearly to the same extent, except for tryhard speed-farmers, and those people are lame anyway.

Plus, in my opinion, making jobs as "nonequivalent" as possible actually makes for easier balancing (see Smash Bros). You have the freedom to tweak the damage or speed on specific skills in isolation without needing to constantly look at how that same change affects the equivalencies on all the other classes. Certainly I think this applies at least with respect to DPS skills, since they all ultimately have the same specific outcome. And in a game where all non-DPS skills have been so heavily homogenized for consistency, they might as well diversify as much as they can along the only axis they can: DPS.

[Astralrisk]

Its crazy for Yoshi P to say that the community needs to all agree on something when I've seen so many people be critical of the 2 minute design when I've seen literally no one say that buff alignment before EW was an issue. Especially when its to make the game easier when all it does is make it more punishing on players.

[Darkpaw]

Its crazy for Yoshi P to say that the community needs to all agree on something when I've seen so many people be critical of the 2 minute design when I've seen literally no one say that buff alignment before EW was an issue. Especially when its to make the game easier when all it does is make it more punishing on players.

You’re talking about the days of yore, in the Heavensward, Stormblood days, when buff’s didn’t align, you had skills on weird timers, back when a very vocal segment of “raiders” were on here near hourly wanting the job buffs to fall into alignment. It was near impossible to go through a single page of the forums without seeing a demand for it.


All in pursuit of a higher pixelated number. Players of this job or that job clamouring for buffs for their jobs or nerfs for another. Then when nerfs came the outcry of anger because “they destroyed my precious numbers”