The Great FFXIV Exodus of 2024

[CNitsah]

The forums are in no way how to gauge the player-base stability for population queries in any game. They are frankly the vocal minority of the game. The majority of players don't even come to the forums for several reasons, one of them being how just absolutely toxic forums are. Most players would only come to seek out resolve to a problem and come across forums with an internet search related to the issue. The problem is SE reads these and other forums for ideas, and take them most of the time as gospel. They implement dumb ass changes that either no one asked for, or interpreted how they think it should be done, and get it totally screwed up. Some things are still that way since implementation and a certain Director's ego won't allow that to be changed.

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And what would you take to gauge the players representativity?
- The social media. Twitter is still ok, but both subreddit now kinda align with the forum, even the one that was known to be place where you were downvoted to oblivion when you dared to criticized the game. If you go in the comments, you'll see the same kind of "I cancelled my sub" comments, on a far larger scale.
- the numbers we have access to? LuckyBancho, considered as a trustworthy source goes that way, we're bleeding players, and are nearly back to pre ShB numbers.
- You could also use the activity of the game on twitch, but there too it's not so good. Big streamers that used to play FFXIV now only play occasionally, most smaller streamer that were nearly FFXIV only now play other heavily play other things. The FFXIV category has fallen down so much over the last 6 to 9 month.

And those are only the one that seem obvious, I could probably find others if I thought a little more about it.

Now, sure, the game is still far from being dead, but there is moment where you have to consider the possibility that, for once, the forum might be representative of the global feeling and not be "a vocal minority". Every hints point to the direction the game is in crisis, yet there you are, contiuing to pretend the forum are not representative on principle.