#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[HighlanderClone]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Qt2FRgXO3b4

Literally quit the game en masse , a healer strike where you STILL GIVE THEM MONEY isnt going to do anything

A lot of people have already quit before the strike even started because of the boring the game is.

Legions of players also quit during ARR because of how dull the base gameplay is.

You are looking at a tiny, tiny minority on the forums who both (1) dislike the game, but (2) still tolerate/enjoy it enough to stay. Most of the "dissatisfied" population have long since quit.

I play multiple other MMOs, and I genuinely have not heard anything good about FF14's gameplay when talking to former FF14 players.

The FF14 community is a bubble. I don't think most of you realize just how boring this game is to people outside the bubble.

There's also the issue that game companies are not adept at statistical inference. They think X game got popular because of easily observed factors Y. I hate to use this overused idea, but this is unironically a serious case of correlation, and not causation. Game companies are physically unable to get causal data from their metrics, because there are too many variables that happen all at once in a game. No MMO is doing A/B testing, or running pilot experiments, or exploiting some natural exogenous variation to determine exactly what factor(s) caused a game's success.

Which is why FF14 developers don't necessarily understand that the dumbing down and simplification of the game may not be why the game was successful during COVID at all.

Lest you assume that I'm underestimating their proficiency at digesting statistics, please remember that multiple top tech firms in the Silicon Valley, who hire legions of stat, ML, econ PhDs every year, many of whom are adept at causal inference techniques, all attributed the cause of the consumption boost during the pandemic to initiatives that they've started, coincidentally, during that period, which is why they just laid off all those people after the pandemic. All of them mistake their increased financial performance as being caused by factors that were not even in their control.

They unironically need player feedback, because it's impossible to tell what caused what by just looking at the metrics.

As for why I think FF14 has been successful in EW launch? I don't think it's because this game is any good. Maybe it's better than the rest of the junk in the genre, but I believe, by far, the biggest reason is (1) the pandemic and (2) the marketing and PR.

Unfortunately, many in the community, probably including many in management at Square Enix, attribute their success to the oversimplification of jobs or the casualization of the entire game.

Which makes no sense because no player is buying FF14 because Black Mage got their non-standard lines ripped out. If you look at the player population from HW to SB, and from SB to ShB, they were also increasing a lot, percentage-wise, despite the Gordias "fiasco", despite crafting and gathering being very hard to penetrate, despite TK monk being a thing, despite dungeons actually requiring a healer to clear, despite alliance raids ending in wipes pretty regularly.

[Tyintheron]

despite crafting and gathering being very hard to penetrate

Anecdotally, though, I can say that I know multiple people who found the Ishgardian Restoration a really simplified in-road into crafting - something they wouldn't have tackled otherwise.

And it certainly seems to me like that's an example of them greatly simplifying a system that, on the surface, seemed to bring in a lot of people who may otherwise have never touched the 1-80 crafting and gathering professions (though, granted, I doubt anyone started playing the game for crafting!).

Just to be clear - I think you're bringing up a bunch of good points about how what they think they know could be wrong! But I also think that in an example like crafting and gathering, they can certainly look at how having a simplified path for the player to follow has increased the usage of those systems across the entire playerbase.

The same is probably true of player jumps in something like, say, the introduction of Crystalline Conflict and the levels of overall participation in PvP. "We made this easier to get into, and now 75% of people play at least some form of this mode semi-regularly, as opposed to the 20% before" (he says, pulling those numbers ouf of thin air) probably isn't that hard to see as a win.

I think if we're talking about the overall userbase, there's certainly an argument to be made that it was some combination of COVID, the WoW-pocalypse, and probably 20 other small factors that led to the userbase growing so quickly. But when you get down into the details of participation in specific features, "more players playing this mode/using this feature after simplifying it/adding new x reward stream" can be pretty statistically clear-cut.

And that might be the whole point - they're likely interested in participation, because participation equals retention. If one healer quits due to system simplification but another ten people start raiding for the first time because they "get it" better or even just flat-out prefer a simpler system, the math becomes pretty clear.

That's what I'm assuming is going on behind the scenes, anyway.

[HighlanderClone]

I think if we're talking about the overall userbase, there's certainly an argument to be made that it was some combination of COVID, the WoW-pocalypse, and probably 20 other small factors that led to the userbase growing so quickly. But when you get down into the details of participation in specific features, "more players playing this mode/using this feature after simplifying it/adding new x reward stream" can be pretty statistically clear-cut.

Of course. But let's just take SMN as an example.

SMN is very popular in EW. The change to SMN is obviously the cause.

But there isn't one single change to SMN. There are multiple.

It was made much easier.

It was given much flashier animations.

It was given more utility and made its ability to resurrect more robust.

Can you isolate any of these factors individually?

And there are also factors beyond changes to SMN itself that interacts with the factors of SMN's changes.

For example: what about the lack of a new caster job in EW? Did people gravitate to SMN because it's as if there was a new caster?

Or what about the raid design? Did the raid design incentivize people to pick up SMN?

Did people pick up SMN because they were leveling Arcanist?

I do not think Square Enix has the data or the tech to determine which exact factor caused what. In fact I don't believe it's even theoretically possible because the SMN changes are a package of factors that cannot be disentangled.

This becomes worse when it's data on stuff like Eureka participation. You have no way of knowing why people did Anemos:

(1) Is it because they found Anemos fun?

(2) Is it because they had nothing else to do in 4.25?

(3) Is it because they wanted the relic glams?

I won't hide my dissatisfaction of poor analysis by amateur statisticians in places like /r/ffxivdiscussion: there are people who argue that Island Sanctuary was a bigger success than something like Bozja.

They use the completion rates of IS vs Bozja to show their point.

That's complete idiocy, since the biggest determinant of completion is the time required to reach completion when it comes to IS vs Bozja.

These are three examples that hopefully explain why I am extremely skeptical SE is able to deduce any cause from the data they have.