January 9, 2016 Active player census (and savage clear rates)

[Shizukya]

There's not only a lack of challenging content, there's a lack of middle ground as well. The only real "midcore" content we have is A1S and A2S. I get that some people find the difficulty of A3S and A4S fun, but based on the clear rates that audience is very small indeed. It seems like many people have just given up on raiding altogether until the new tier comes out in 3.2 because of how high the raids are tuned.

Well as you said, its like A1S and A2S is for midcore, A3S and A4S for hardcore right. On first hand i started as casual raider (2-3days) and took few weeks to down A1S-A2S, and then became midcore (4-5days) and cleared A3S-A4S within 2 months. I think they just did not fail on A3S and A4S beacuse they are still "fun" but the problem is that the community is mostly between casual and midcore and only few can commit the time required to clear the 2 last floors, thats the issue. They made 2 raids for "middle ground" as you said, 2 raids for "hardcore scene", so now they going to give Savage Midas, open for most population = midcore, focusing on mechanics instead of dps checks just like old coils. Plus they gonna Nerf Savage Gordias, then more ppl will be able to got his A4S mount. So the issue is solved, right.

[Kuwagami]

I think again that people should remember that Coils are DIFFERENT from Alex SAVAGE just like Coils SAVAGE, you just cant compare Alex savage rates and Coils savage rates.

Yoshida made no gate to let people go through story and give everyone something they wanted, a normal story vers + some hard mode because ppl was complaining about coils ease.

You make 2 mistakes here.

One is comparing Alexander savage and Coil savage. Mostly because there was nothing to do in coil savage once you had beaten it (it was a skill check, for bragging rights), while Alexander savage is our only difficult encounter in the entire game (If we are to consider Ex primals as mid-core, that would make 2 with Thordan I guess). Regular Coil difficulty is nowhere to be seen as of 3.0 onwards. Alexander Savage IS the spiritual successor of regular Coil, no matter how people might try to twist it. And it failed grossly at that.

The second is thinking that people wanted story + harder.
I was of the people asking for a story version. The idea was to have a nerfed + echo version, in order to leave the regular version of the raid untouched, and released after the regular version. Most of the people complaining of Coil ease weren't even ding Coil in the first place and were barking about the 1 week clear of Lucrezia.

Now Alexander story did the difficulty quite right (imo a bit too braindead but that's ok, it's story mode), but the release timing was horrible. You chunk off a lot of incentives of doing savage by releasing the sory mode before even entering the difficult mode, especially considering the abusive dps checks of AS3 (or even Faust-sensei at release. Many groups were crying back then, spending a few weeks on AS1 trash only) which only discouraged the players and further reduced the raiding scene.

Nevermind the release timer. Onto Alexander savage's difficulty then. Most if not all serious raiders at the time said it. It was bad design, purely revolving around dps checks. To the point they abused a game flaw to get an easier enrage timer on AS4 (I know the strat is valid because devs ackowledged they failed to see the issue beforehand and never fixed it, blah blah blah). And when people massively asked why the heck we only had an idioticly hard "deeps onry" version and not a coil-like difficulty, the answer was "not enough staff to do 3 tiers".

Now I get it, they don't have enough people and all, that's fine. No 3-tiered raid difficulty. That's fine. But then, you have to look at numbers to check if it's worth to have this tier or this other one. And if we look at (unofficial) numbers, we have a pretty high rate of Story mode clear (official numbers as of August were 200k clears or so iirc) and an awfully low clear rate in savage : 0.075%. Looking back at Coil after 5 months, 15% clear or so. It's braindead to know which version is the best use of your time to develop if you don't want it to be trashed away day one.

Alexander savage was a mistake imo, speaking from a "development time use" point of view. Especially because it created a desert in mid-core content, leaving people with nothing to do. Errors happen, that's natural. But things need to change if we want a healthier mid-core scene, because continuing down the "braindead story + absurd savage" road will only hurt the raiding scene further.

On first hand i started as casual raider (2-3days) and took few weeks to down A1S-A2S, and then became midcore (4-5days)

2-3 days a week is not really casual raiding. More like normal raiding scene (midcore), while your 4-5 days is pretty much hardcore raiding.

The "casual" raiders I know are going out once a week, on week ends, because they can't play for hours straight during working days, if at all.

To each their own I guess, but casual is really misused nowadays.

[Shizukya]

Alexander savage was a mistake imo, speaking from a "development time use" point of view. Especially because it created a desert in mid-core content, leaving people with nothing to do. Errors happen, that's natural. But things need to change if we want a healthier mid-core scene, because continuing down the "braindead story + absurd savage" road will only hurt the raiding scene further.

2-3 days a week is not really casual raiding. More like normal raiding scene (midcore), while your 4-5 days is pretty much hardcore raiding.

The "casual" raiders I know are going out once a week, on week ends, because they can't play for hours straight during working days, if at all.

To each their own I guess, but casual is really misused nowadays.

Oh well, for me, FCOB look harder than AS3 and AS4 with its mechanic-wise, for real, i had some kills unsync + echo, it's chaos

And, also, hardcore for me is like everyday, with 5-10hours ? I know some groups like that and i've also been hardcore for a short period doing everyday for 2-3 lockouts. That's hardcore, for me.
Most my friends are casual and can commit 2-3 days/ week for raid, then i think it depends on ppl point of view, after all. (and we all are working ^^)

[ruskie]

If people can't be bothered to do 3.1's MSQ...which in itself was also content that was part of 3.1's release....that's concerning. Espesically if one of the strong points of FFXIV is the storyline and presentation.

I think part of the problem is also that the next story quest... is in the manor so you don't see it pop on your map anywhere... I don't know about others but I was like - where's the MSQ quest... It is at times hard to remember/find where the quest finished to resume so that might be it as well.

[Warlyx]

I think part of the problem is also that the next story quest... is in the manor so you don't see it pop on your map anywhere... I don't know about others but I was like - where's the MSQ quest... It is at times hard to remember/find where the quest finished to resume so that might be it as well.

if ppl didnt even bother to check the patch notes ,ask in FC chat where the MSQ quest starts.......then they arent interested in doing MSQ in the 1 place...

[RickXRolled]

Oh well, for me, FCOB look harder than AS3 and AS4 with its mechanic-wise, for real, i had some kills unsync + echo, it's chaos

And, also, hardcore for me is like everyday, with 5-10hours ? I know some groups like that and i've also been hardcore for a short period doing everyday for 2-3 lockouts. That's hardcore, for me.
Most my friends are casual and can commit 2-3 days/ week for raid, then i think it depends on ppl point of view, after all. (and we all are working ^^)

I think most people would heavily disagree with you.

[Shizukya]

I think most people would heavily disagree with you.

As said, "for me"

[ruskie]

Oh well, for me, FCOB look harder than AS3 and AS4 with its mechanic-wise, for real, i had some kills unsync + echo, it's chaos

And, also, hardcore for me is like everyday, with 5-10hours ? I know some groups like that and i've also been hardcore for a short period doing everyday for 2-3 lockouts. That's hardcore, for me.
Most my friends are casual and can commit 2-3 days/ week for raid, then i think it depends on ppl point of view, after all. (and we all are working ^^)

Actually a lot of fights unsynced 8 man are utter chaos. Things get pushed to fast, some stuff is time and some hp sensitive etc...

T7 is a prime example - you'll have 8 adds up in like 2 minutes. All the adds at the same time...

Ifrit EX, Levi EX have that problem as well.

Some fights basically are friendly to being pushed overboard - phase skips and such - others not so much.

[Yukiko]

(..) that it was a game direction error (..)

So far it is what was intended...
When I remember correct they were talking with server first clear groups (Order of the Blue Garter, and such) about content and it is exactly what they were wishing for (harder, harder, HARDER)... The Numbers just reflect that... what is going wrong is that developers missed to ask the "others". It was reduced to all none server first clear groups just like to watch a movie, so giving them a story mode is enough... The point is most players are playing because progress and storymode is giving nothing to progress the character!

Edit: It is not the content that makes the problems, it is the lack of progress and I think they have to remake the progress design of this game. If you cant beat savage why you must be stuck with progress and WAIT months for new gear (in hope they dont have added any onehit mechanics)

Edit2:

Yoshida: After the Binding Coil and Second Coil, we got a lot of feedback like "it's too hard!", so we had a good idea of how we wanted to make Final Coil, but then we got a lot of feedback like "it was easy, make more challenging content!"...

As I remember the community did not say it was "too easy", they said something about it was too boring because mechanics... and challenge does not mean harder content, it means "having something to do" the key in "challenge" is to use strategy and thats the one thing action games cant serve well...

[Preypacer]

Hmm, I didn't expect it to be so bad..
F2P in 1 year? (Yeah, Yoshi said they won't do F2P, but in other interview he said, he would do it if people really wanted it)

Yeah, he's always said that if it seemed like the right thing to do for the game, that they would make the switch to F2P. He'd said that they kept it as Subs, at least in part, because that's the model they'd promised to release it as, and they wanted to keep that promise (I've no complaints there; I can't stand the Free 2 Pay More model, and all it entails, personally). Though I'd be lying if I said this game's design, and the way they have us acquire new gear, wasn't set up perfectly for a F2P system.

One of the many methods of getting people to spend in the cash shop is to make grinds in the game painfully tedious (we're already kinda there with some of the stuff in XIV, no?), and then sell things in the cash shop to make the grind faster/easier. So, were this applied to FFXIV, (folks, this is hypothetical, don't take it as being an actual example lol)... imagine you're doing the grind for Relic, and that drop rate is loooooow (it would likely be even lower in a F2P scenario). Well, you know, there's this item in the cash shop that will increase the drop rate by 200% or 400%, if you want to spend a little more. So, you can continue grinding it the s-l-o-w way, and not spend the money, meanwhile seeing people around you all getting their drops and moving on way faste... Or, you can drop $10 or $20 on he cash shop, and join them in getting your Relic weapon sooner rather than later. And it wouldn't technically be pay to win.... because you don't have to spend that money. You still have the option of getting it the slow way.

The above would be a very plausible scenario in a F2P FFXIV, and it's why - though they would consider it - I hope they never make that change.

Back on Topic...

~700k players is a nice number... but I'm glad it's out there. I always knew their "5 million players" marketing was BS; that they're using registered members, not active players. I just always wondered how far off it was. Many MMO devs use registered members, instead of active players, and I wish they didn't. It's really slimy and dishonest. It's fooled many people into believing (and arguing at length) that XIV's active playerbase rivals WoW's, which simply isn't true.