playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

[Vermilion]

I logged back on for the update. Was not impressed, went back to being inactive. I'm part of that 25% and proud.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

So apparantely someone made a post on the JP forums and made a lodestone crawler to check active players over the last 4 months, they found that around 25% have stopped logging on, even once in the last 4 month period from when they started scanning. Thats a large loss during free mode when they are still updating the game, that means those 25% didn't even bother to log in after updates to check stuff out.

http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...7781898&page=1

Link to the original JP post in that topic.

I know about 15 people alone that don't plan on coming back to play until 1.20 comes out or after that. So these numbers aren't surprising, but there was a lot of people who did come back for 1.18 myself included. Which I don't play as much as I used to but I still get on several times a week.

[weeble]

i'd suggest to SE devs to work on a endgame that is full ls event, something like sky. with lots of farming of mobs, good tactics and dynamic battles, with nm's and very hard hnm's. with drop ranging from pretty easy to very difficult from easy drop rates to 1%drop rate rewards.

as u can see a simple dungeon didn't cut it, (maybe they have a expansion in the works with something like this, i hope so) i say everyone would be logging in and enjoying this type of content if it was added. people would log in and stay loged in to do this. least that is my opinion but i'm almost certain of it.

8 and 4man dungeons don't create commrodery, it creates clicks ...and everyone else just logged back out. and this dungeon didn't help since most people didn't want anything else other then con,archer or glad. lets hope se listens to this cause i'm almost certain that no dungeons will keep most players, only the few they already have just stay a little more entertained.

[Bethor]

i'd suggest to SE devs to work on a endgame that is full ls event, something like sky. with lots of farming of mobs, good tactics and dynamic battles, with nm's and very hard hnm's. with drop ranging from pretty easy to very difficult from easy drop rates to 1%drop rate rewards.

as u can see a simple dungeon didn't cut it, (maybe they have a expansion in the works with something like this, i hope so) i say everyone would be logging in and enjoying this type of content if it was added. people would log in and stay loged in to do this. least that is my opinion but i'm almost certain of it.

8 and 4man dungeons don't create commrodery, it creates clicks ...and everyone else just logged back out. and this dungeon didn't help since most people didn't want anything else other then con,archer or glad. lets hope se listens to this cause i'm almost certain that no dungeons will keep most players, only the few they already have just stay a little more entertained.

Before they actually add in new content, they should rather work on the battle adjustments and adv. Jobs. In my opinion it was wrong to actually implement those dungeons w/o the right adjustments to the core systems. An overhaul of those skill icons or a few WS animations haven't changed a tiny bit in gameplay.
Even with Auto-Attack now the fighting still feels sloppy and clunky.

Of course there are people who actually like the new game play and etc. In points of battle improvements I would scratch a few WS's and abilites. At the moment you have too much abilites you can spam. It's still the 111111111 Spam motion we've had before AA.
Actually decreasing the avaible AP would cause the players to choose their ability more wisely. Instead of.. ok I put 90% of my native skills and 10% cross-skills.

I've already mentioned that they should rise the AP cost of cross-skills so you better chose the best ones. At the moment everyone's setting every ATT+ Skill they can get via SPing other jobs. While it's cool to cross-skill everything but it's not helping towards the individuality.

I'm only logging on every now and then because the gameplay isn't feeling right. I've thought about it a few days ago. Even if I'm pulling the FFXI (which I hate to do actually) card again...
SPing your character in FFXI was a really really hard thing to do. Getting to 75 wasn't done in 1-2 months if you've started the game from 0. Every FFXI can still remember their Time hitting 75 on their first char. It was an awesome feeling. (getting that DAMN Buffer wasn't though xD).

So everytime you logged in and you were in lfp mode, it was kinda a must. And it was on your playing shedule. It was fun to achieve certain levels because of new shiny WS, new Spells, new Gear and what not. Trying that stuff out in new parties was awesome.

In terms of FFXIV it's like... you can get to cap w/o any much hassle. You only need time basically. Of course you needed time for FFXI as well. But in FFXIV it's like I will get to 50 anyway, no matter what I do. If it's SPing with leves, quests or maybe plain SPing in the field. I dunno how to express this correctly.. but FFXIV definetly feels different than FFXI at the moment in terms of accomplishments.

I wanna see how my character developes on its own. I'd like to see more skills getting rewarded from hard battles/quests instead of DING "oh shi, I gotz a skill". Or actually implement a skill-up system again. So you get full effect on a skill if you've trained it.

Well.. we can only wait and see what the next patches going to implement. The one with the weapon visibilty is crap though. I have no clue who wants this. Of course there's a toggle mode but... honestly I can't see the point of adding this. I really really hope the game is gonna shine at some point, but at the moment it is clearly not.

And a new shedule by Yoshi P would be awesome, even if its not attached with fixed dates. Ah well... patience.. patience... =x

P.S.: Yoshi can make me happy if they add Blue mage with the new job system XD (too bad thats not going to happen T.T since we only have like 10 mobs which are getting re-modeled onry anyway)

[Serio]

i'd suggest to SE devs to work on a endgame that is full ls event, something like sky. with lots of farming of mobs, good tactics and dynamic battles, with nm's and very hard hnm's. with drop ranging from pretty easy to very difficult from easy drop rates to 1%drop rate rewards.

as u can see a simple dungeon didn't cut it, (maybe they have a expansion in the works with something like this, i hope so) i say everyone would be logging in and enjoying this type of content if it was added. people would log in and stay loged in to do this. least that is my opinion but i'm almost certain of it.

8 and 4man dungeons don't create commrodery, it creates clicks ...and everyone else just logged back out. and this dungeon didn't help since most people didn't want anything else other then con,archer or glad. lets hope se listens to this cause i'm almost certain that no dungeons will keep most players, only the few they already have just stay a little more entertained.

I'm sure that the devs are working on large scale events for linkshells. Yoshi-P has stated in one of his letters (forgot which one) that the raids we have gotten are actually "Casual" content, and that they are going to implement larger scale dungeons for "Hardcore" players. Also in that Hardcore category, he did specify that there will be really hard HNMs. We just aren't seeing any of that stuff yet.

After 1.18 I did notice a spike of people that got on and then left again. Some pre-1.18ers even left. What I saw 1.18 as was a mere taste of what is to come. Honestly I can't blame people for leaving, but I have confidence in this game further down the road.

Lots of the content was put on hold due to reform reform reform. Tanaka's original vision was, I'd say, 90% fail. Hell, even before Yoshi-P came to the scene Tanaka's team was reforming the game post-launch, pushing the release of content further and further back. Tanaka was obviously pulling some experimental sh!t, and you can tell now that Yoshi is taking a more practical approach.

If Tanaka had gotten his vision right, we would've seen this (1.18) content in November, but the game was still so bad that they had to stop the whole project to reform. When they decide to do reforms they have to adjust all the content to those reforms. It basically means that the dungeons, NMs, etc. were supposed to function on the original system. So technically they didn't "add" new content because those raids were already there (the last patch was only 577MB, which isn't enough data for brand-spanking new raids, which means that they were already installed on your computer on the original game). They just had to be reworked because of the reforms.

As Yoshi explained, when he approves a new project, it takes about 6 months before we see its implementation. So let's do some math. The raids were probably supposed to be out by November, but Tanaka's team had to reform some things. So that's like about 4 months to adjust the raids, by like January-ish. Then Yoshi takes over and says "Wow this battle system is crappy. Let's shrink max party size and do auto-attack." Now we're seeing the 6 months right on time to where we're at. A few more reforms need to be done, but the devs have probably been working on that for a few months now.

As I see it, 1.18 is the reset point and we'll start to see more players with each coming patch. I think there will be a trend in those patches like 50% content/50% reforms. Once the reforms are complete, I'm sure that they will release ALL of the content that came with the game. I'm guessing that there were about 6-8 casual raids, and 2-4 hardcore dungeons in the original layout.

So I'm not really shocked that the player base has gone downhill because the game is still incomplete. The devs are working on its completion alongside the reforms, meaning that it's still going to take a long time. My guess is that everything will be done by this winter. We can expect this issue of player population to be resolved by that point. The game is actually very awesome, but ONLY if you consider that it's still under construction.

[odette]

i'd suggest to SE devs to work on a endgame that is full ls event, something like sky. with lots of farming of mobs, good tactics and dynamic battles, with nm's and very hard hnm's. with drop ranging from pretty easy to very difficult from easy drop rates to 1%drop rate rewards.

as u can see a simple dungeon didn't cut it, (maybe they have a expansion in the works with something like this, i hope so) i say everyone would be logging in and enjoying this type of content if it was added. people would log in and stay loged in to do this. least that is my opinion but i'm almost certain of it.

8 and 4man dungeons don't create commrodery, it creates clicks ...and everyone else just logged back out. and this dungeon didn't help since most people didn't want anything else other then con,archer or glad. lets hope se listens to this cause i'm almost certain that no dungeons will keep most players, only the few they already have just stay a little more entertained.

No thanks
i prefer more more dungeons that crappy hnms like ffxi where you wait for hours for claim this is boring and obsolet
the real problem of ffxiv is the ffxi players that they wanna outher ffxi, with obsolet things and unatractive for new player
SE need more new players that ffxi old players that they quit ffxi looong time ago and dont like the worlds change

[weeble]

No thanks
i prefer more more dungeons that crappy hnms like ffxi where you wait for hours for claim this is boring and obsolet
the real problem of ffxiv is the ffxi players that they wanna outher ffxi, with obsolet things and unatractive for new player
SE need more new players that ffxi old players that they quit ffxi looong time ago and dont like the worlds change

most nm's in sky were replaced with pop items, they was not waiting, and even when there was timing between them u still had a million things there to do inbetween.

and ffxi players are probably all this game has left,...outside of rmt or people that are "like rmt" ffxi players didn't ruin this game, ffxi was one of the few mmo's that did well in the years and those numbers moving from ffxi to ffxiv is a good thing. they aren't outdated and unatractive game play, they are challenging gameplay, with lots of game time to do them.

i don't want another ffxi, but if it comes down to a choice of wow gameplay or ffxi gameplay i chose ffxi. games aren't hugely changing but things that are gonna be the same ...ummm yes ffxi all the way, i don't want wow or anything of it in this game ..so what. it's not what ruin this game, it's like i said lack of content, content that takes time to do, and lack of things people can do together as a team.

how bad it's doing and how each patch less not more people come back is a sign that im probably correct, and i'm pretty sure they will head in the direction i'm thinking or game will completly die out.

[Seif]

Well that's the reality of the situation. It's hard to believe things are so bad when reading these forums it seems everybody is in love with the game post 1.18.

SE's biggest difficulty is to market these changes to the people who have left because all changes by themselves are pretty minor that contribute to a bigger very slow change that we've hopefully seen the beginning of.

Airships and Chocobos are really nice but in a game that has a ( in my opinion a bad hacked in) system like anima the transportation was never a major gameplay issue to begin with for those players who were on the fence and haven't been playing non-stop to burn their massive anima pools.

I hope the are redesigns will be dramatic enough to be an effective marketing tool. If it's just more variety to trees then I'm afraid nobody will care.

[Gramul]

Okay. You guys can argue all you want. But please drop the personal insults.
It makes the discussion seem childish and unworthy of the analytical attention the subject needs.

[Rinsui]

Okay. You guys can argue all you want. But please drop the personal insults.
It makes the discussion seem childish and unworthy of the analytical attention the subject needs.

It's hard to stay analytical
in the face of an amorphous mass of
ignorance.