playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

[ViolentDjango]

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.

This surprises you why?

More over, this is the number of people I expected the game to have without the PS3 launch... 90% of the the people I know who planned to play planned to play on PS3 -- the number will spike if they make enough repairs before PS3 release to make the game enjoyable.

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.

People keep saying "leaving" like folks are ending subscriptions and uninstalling the game... There's no much reason to play the game EVERYDAY, most people just only get on once or twice a week or after major updates to see what's changed. When there's more things to actually do online, and people stick around so you have people to talk to, then the numbers will go up again.

Believe it or not, but the number of people you actually get to deal with in an MMO has a huge effect on how many people consistently log on. Its hard to play an MMO when there's no one to talk to. The fact that MMOs and offline RPGs have completely different atmospheres isn't an accident.

[elreed]

One thing that i find to be really lame is people who still comes to the forums to discuss about a game they dont like at all, and by all means wants to people to agree with them in how much the game sucks....

I like the game i actually even liked the game without autoattack, it needs content yeah, but right now i have still plenty of stuff to do in there, im not playing the game all day and if get bored i go out and chill and take it like what it is (GAME), if i didnt like this game and wasnt playing why the hell should i waste my time playing it or even posting about it?

Get a life