playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

[viion]

Aaah, 2-chan script kiddies that think they can produce valid statistics with an empyrical crawler.

That crawler only tracks accounts that shown a change in the SP totals. Guess what? someone that's at 50 already and does only activities that pertain his maxed classes (NM hunting, dungeons, crafting and so forth) does NOT have any increase in SP.

The more time goes on, the more people get to cap in all the classes they want, and dedicate themselves only to endgame activities (that in this game aren't numerous, but they do exist, and can still fill up someone's time unless he plays a lot), according to that crawler, all those people are considered "inactive".

Good job producing a completely invalid statistic there.

Hey umm..

It doesn't track chars with full rank 50s, I built one of these script for network sites a while back and it wouldnt surprise me if they used it (or modded it). I also run a site based on in-game activity (not just SP but everything you do ingame) and things are gradually slowing down, but more like 25% over 8 months.

But we all know you'd defend the game if it gave your cancer.


If you dont want to believe in that, look at the producer letter compared to the last one, dropped 50% in views and NA 33%. (30k/10k respectively), interest is dying.

[Abriael]

Hey umm..

It doesn't track chars with full rank 50s, I built one of these script for network sites a while back and it wouldnt surprise me if they used it (or modded it). I also run a site based on in-game activity (not just SP but everything you do ingame) and things are gradually slowing down, but more like 25% over 8 months.

But we all know you'd defend the game if it gave your cancer.

if it doesn't track chars with full rank 50s it's even less valid. Without even mentioning all those people that don't have ALL 50s, but just the ones they want/need, and just do NMs/dungeons/crafting on their maxed clases, without gaining any SP in their lower classes.

As for your site, that'd be a valid statistical source? because you know, "things gradually slowing down" can easily mean that people are gradually stopping to use your site (since it requires manual updates). Thought ever occurred to you?

But we all know you'd bash this game even if it was a perfect 10/10 that made coffee and cleaned your house on top of it. It's called obsession.

[Arcell]

They sure a fighting an uphill battle. Whenever they release a new patch, they get a lot of positive feedback from the community; for about 2 weeks, when that there's nothing else to do becomes evident once again. There simply isn't enough "base goodness" in this game to grow on. It still is in beta a year after its release.

I wonder how newcomers would react to the game world, though. For them, the content we were fed bit by bit may sum up to look like an impresive amount...?

That's just it, there's no way to reasonably put out enough content to keep people who have been playing since launch busy for longer than a few weeks at a time. This is because they've done everything else and the new content is the ONLY thing to do. Every bit of content added is important for new players though as it is even more to aspire and look forward to.

[Leenk]

I highly doubt the increased mp cost is directly responsible for people not playing or will cause incoming players to turn away. This is just as ridiculous as claiming that anima will cause people to turn away. No single issue of that sort is going to so easily turn away the average player.
As for the notion that 1.18 somehow made it "too difficult" to solo... i havent had any issue soloing. You just have to be smarter than the average mob

[viion]

if it doesn't track chars with full rank 50s it's even less valid. Without even mentioning all those people that don't have ALL 50s, but just the ones they want/need, and just do NMs, without gaining any SP in their lower classes.

As for your site, that'd be a valid statistical source? because you know, "things gradually slowing down" can easily mean that people are gradually stopping to use your site (since it requires manual updates). Thought ever occurred to you?

But we all know you'd bash this game even if it was a perfect 10/10 that made coffee and cleaned your house on top of it. It's called obsession.

When my visitor count is increasing every day, no that doesn't occur to me.

If it was a perfect 10/10 and made coffee, infact i dont like coffee but i'd drink it because the game would be a 10/10.

And how would ignoring a straight 50 be less invalid? You think characters with 19x50's overrule every other character? ....... thats retarded if you think it does lol. Less than 0.1% probably have a full 50.

[Preypacer]

I'm not surprised. i know the dev team is working their asses off because their jobs likely depend on this game succeeding, but development takes a long time, and players' patience is not nearly as long. I don't want to believe it, but this game may have been doomed from launch even if what Yoshida said about not having to please investors is true. I have trouble seeing how SE will develop enough content that's both quality enough to be fun and sufficient to occupy players, since the game shipped with almost none. It feels like they'd need a whole other development team just for adding content until it gets to an acceptable level, then they could continue with the standard one, but this game's been a big enough monetary drag on SE as is so I doubt that'll happen.

As an earlier post mentioned, the next few patches would probably have to be dynamite to keep this game at a "fair" population even if it is free. Hell, I have more to do on some F2P games than I do on this one right now, and the slow slog to rank 50 doesn't help motivation.

Sometimes I think it would have been better for them to take the game offline, get player feedback as they did, put the new team in place as they did... and then just dig in and get some serious work done for the next year.

Do another closed beta *only* with those who were shown to provide useful feedback in the previous beta cycle. That is, not people looking to jump into the game so they can play for 10 minutes and then immediately start spamming every forum they know of with "The game still sucks! It's gonna fail!".. because we know those people exist and that their sad little lives revolve around such crap... But I digress...

Do betas in "cycles" with each cycle very specifically focused on specific mechanics and systems. I know they did this in the actual betas, but it wasn't really "focused". It was the same general beta, but with SE asking people to please test "this system" or "that system". Many people were only concerned with making as much progress as they could before the game went retail, playing it as though it were the live release.

During this beta period, *listen* to the feedback - the useful feedback that is (it's always important to distinguish the signal from the noise; to recognize whether feedback is truly helpful for the game, or merely an individual wanting it changed to suit them personally) - and make adjustments. Do *not* go the route of "Well it's working as designed and people will see how it all works out fine in live release..." as Tanaka did.

That was a *huge* mistake on his part, especially considering even after live, people had exactly the same complaints... only there were more of them, and now it was too late to do something about it. The cat was out of bag and the milk was spilt. He assured people the shortcomings we saw were "only because we were seeing 10% of the complete game"... only for us to find out that wasn't true; that what we saw in Beta was exactly what we would see in release.

It was tragic the way he mis-handled the feedback he got in Beta. A lot of it was *very* poignant and *very* good feedback, especially in hindsight. There have been some very intelligent and insightful people in this game's community.. especially during beta.

I think if they were to go back into dev mode and proceed on the path they're on now, with the approach Yoshi's been taking, it would do much better for them.

Some people may disagree because it would have prevented them from playing it in the short-term. I personally believe - and this is just my feeling - that it would have served the game far better in the long term if they'd done that.

Rather than getting burned out on lack of content, repetitive environments and so forth... Anticipation would have built up for it again. People would be more and more curious about what changes they were making, etc. It wouldn't have been "in their face" every moment, so their curiosity would keep them engaged.

Just my two cents though.

[Abriael]

When my visitor count is increasing every day, not that doesn't occur to me.

Visitors don't necessarily involve character updates. And if your visitor counter is increasing every day, that's pretty funny how you claim that "things are slowing down". Gotta love when you contradict yourself in your obsessive need to bash this game.

If it was a perfect 10/10 and made coffee, infact i dont like coffee but i'd drink it because the game would be a 10/10.

You seem to drink it anyway, considering you continue to post in a forum and even mantain a site dedicated to a game that you obviously hate. Obsession much?

And how would ignoring a straight 50 be less invalid? You think characters with 19x50's overrule every other character? ....... thats retarded if you think it does lol. Less than 0.1% probably have a full 50.

You forgot all those people that have maxed all the classes they want/need, and that don't level other classes beyond that. They can still easily do dungeons/NM/Crafting with their maxed classes and not earn a single SP. Oops.

Very convenient to forget them. But it doesn't fly.

[Xenor]

This will only get worser i believe.. 1 of the reasons is the extreme Mp costs on Cure. People that solo the compplete time they are on are now forced to party. As you would need a mage to get cured.
I played lesser since the 1.18 as it just doesn't seem to be in any use to play solo anymore. And i just don't like to party up.

Perhaps massively multiplayer online RPGs just aren't for you. I recommend Final Fantasy XIII, you can solo the whole game.

[Tezz_Xivectro]

It doesn't take a scientist to figure out that this game is still dying off. This game will likely not see any true prime until PS3 and after (it's like a broken record around these forums).

[Xenor]

I don't know about other servers but the playerbase of Wutai recovered quite a bit with 1.18. It's still low but the increase is noticeable everywhere. There was 4 people sat in the CRP guild just now, it used to be dead at this time of day. And I have seen many players returning who I hadn't seen in months.