playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

[Seif]

I reinstalled the game for 1.18. At least 15 other people on my friend's list told me they reinstalled specifically for 1.18, probably many more people did the same. Also many people bought the game because of 1.18.

Is the game still underpopulated yes, but I think you need to rephrase your whole "nobody" is going to play the game for the changes they are bringing/have brought.

Fair enough. MOST people haven't and won't return for seemingly small changes.

[Pancakes]

nothing wrong with ppl dropping forums.

When I enjoy the game I'd rather play it than sit on the forum >o

[Ichi]

flop releases don't mean the same thing with mmos as they do with other games.

The proof to that is all around us its been nearly a year and despite the lack of content and level of boredom from many players, were still here talking about it. Hell, this topic was posted 2 months ago and still being revisited now. Shut down this game? GL with that. XIV is here to stay fun or not haters need to get over it.

[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)

[Azurymber]

flop releases don't mean the same thing with mmos as they do with other games.

The proof to that is all around us its been nearly a year and despite the lack of content and level of boredom from many players, were still here talking about it. Hell, this topic was posted 2 months ago and still being revisited now. Shut down this game? GL with that. XIV is here to stay fun or not haters need to get over it.

this.

Plus, ps3 release.... it will be one of the only console MMO's. If they are smart they will make first 3 months free and release near christmas. -SO- many kids will get the game.

[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.

[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.

[Antipika]

this.

Plus, ps3 release.... it will be one of the only console MMO's. If they are smart they will make first 3 months free and release near christmas. -SO- many kids will get the game.

And leave afterwards beacause the game isn't really "kids friendly", the community either. I won't even talk about payment methods which, unless improved until then, will make younger audience flee as well.

[XxOstiaxX]

And leave afterwards beacause the game isn't really "kids friendly", the community either. I won't even talk about payment methods which, unless improved until then, will make younger audience flee as well.

Shhh! Don't tell them that, they don't like to hear that, just tell them, the next patch will be the "ONE"

[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