Unofficial Census 2016 for FFXIV

[KarstenS]

@Census:
Last time it was still a race between Shiva and Ragnarok for [...] the most alex clears

In this case it was a race with Odin. In Gordios Odin was leading the EU front. Now its Ragnarok. But 11 Faustlets are not much difference. We will get you

[FoxyAreku]

90% of people I know (and I know around hundred) were 60-all (combat, gathering, crafting) 2 months after expansion release. So, what leveling? I'm not saying end-game is the only thing that matters, but what else is there to do? You can complete all other content in a few weeks, except maybe pvp, and be done with it. I honestly don't understand how some of you people play the game and still have stuff to do.

Meanwhile I know upwards of 200 people on this game and only like, 5 who are 60 in everything.

Heck I log in every day almost and have for 2 years and I still don't have 3 or 4 of the classes at 60. Not everyone wants to grind everything out as fast as possible. I spend most of my time crafting, raiding savage, or just being social, personally.

I find it really silly to grind everything out that you can in 2 weeks and then complain that there is nothing to do.

Neither here nor there though. I was just pointing out that it's obvious and should be expected that the majority of the playerbase won't be at endgame.

[Stormrider]

The thing before the hate, is how SE spends its limit resources and what players are completing. At what X% is it best not to implement certain content or low completion rate what turns the player base off. As other people have said they aren't interested in the progression gear grind. But they still pay each month. If they are a larger part of the population content should be more focused in a direction that they enjoy and less new patch new gear grind.

SE would not have to say how many subs they have. But X% of people have finished certain content. Also before another Live letter/fan fest and fluff questions maybe another questionnaire about the state of the game and allow the number of created accounts answer and not just active. My concerns might not line up with the majority of the player base, but if I see large percentage of players want more tacking on new content to old content I guess I could accept that.

[aesteval]

The only thing that requires SOME effort in this game is Savage raiding. Evything else is mindnumbling easy. I just can't imagene person, who can't beat Final steps of Faith.

Congrats on the epeen, but you're just not representative of the community as a whole. You must have been very lucky when pugging into Final Steps if you've pugged into it at all.

[aesteval]

90% of people I know (and I know around hundred) were 60-all (combat, gathering, crafting) 2 months after expansion release.

100 players out of hundreds of thousands of players is not a statistically significant sample size.

[Moomba33]

I didn't cap tomestones for most of ARR in spite of playing every day and being caught up with the patches.
Endgame grind just isn't something that interests everyone all the time.

[Critical-Limit]

Personally, I still think the difficulty of savage is killing any will to do Savage. Far more people are willing to do NidEx than Savage for less rewards to boot, despite it having the same template as Savage - story content cranked up.
But then again, in our unofficial player poll 50% of the people weren't even interested in NidEx, so...yeah. If that's remotely representative, it doesn't take a genius to figure out hard content in general is just not considered fun by many.

I like hard content but not the way it's done in this game

And IMO having scripted fights that just take memorization and trial and error for crap glamour isn't worth it. Yes dungeons are scripted too, but at least the esoteric armor looks good.

Not everyone hates hard content. I like hard content. Imo it's the wrong kind of hard so I don't bother. That doesn't auto mean I hate hard content.

[Kai_Lee]

Midas is actually easier then gordias until A8S which is just a cluster F of overlapping mechanics. Even T9 which a lot agree is the hardest floor of the old coil is still easier then A8S. IMO

[Ibi]

Well, looks like the Midas clears are a bit better than the Gordias ones were (I'm remembering a 5%(?) clear rate for the Chocobo server in a similar survey).
I'm curious if there's any similar data for Coil back when it was endgame.

There's not an exact parallel, because neither BCoB nor SCoB awarded a minion or mount and FCoB awarded a minion to everyone who cleared it (rather than one minion per group per clear).

That said, in the April 2015 survey, there were ~36k T13 clears with an active population of ~730k characters, so a clear rate of ~5% after about six months.

Interesting: 3.3 has by far the biggest completion loss of all the MSQ phases - I blame Nidhogg and the endless fetch quest at the end.

It's pretty consistent from one survey to the next that the most recent MSQ segment sees a significant drop off.

Here's the comparable data from the April census:

FYI 500K active players(during a mid patch lull at that) is more than DOUBLE ff11's old daily numbers of 200k

From the 5th through 8th Vana'diel Censuses:

• 2005: "Based on data compiled at the end of March 2005, we conducted research on the main job levels of over 1,550,000 characters belonging to over 500,000 registered users."
  
• 2006: "There are over 500,000 players logging in to FINAL FANTASY XI from all over the world, with the main player base located in Japan, North America, and Europe."
  
• 2007: "FINAL FANTASY XI has steadily grown over the months and years into a thriving community of more than 500,000 users. [...] During any time zone, a significant percentage of the 500,000+ player base will be logged into the game."
  
• 2008: "FINAL FANTASY XI's thriving community has grown to more than 500,000 users."

You can quibble over the term "daily numbers" if you want to, but we don't have that data for either game.

What this consensus tells me is many people may get their wish of a return to Coil difficulty. I strongly feel the last stage of Alexander will be significantly easier than Gordias and Midas were. Hard to argue whether that is a bad thing though, what with how low the clear rates have been.

I don't think there was ever really a significant number of people who wanted something as difficult as even Midas Savage, especially compared to the number of people who were happy with Coil's difficulty.

They just spoke up about it, in some cases at length, while the people who were satisfied with Coil just went about doing Coil.

Add to that plenty of people went back into Gordias after getting either lore gear or beating any of A5S through to A7S and that likely accounts for the differences.

Yep, I know my static got at least eight mounts (I can't remember if we took other people through) from A4S some time after 3.2, so we're certainly bumping that number up.

Not that I disagree with the idea of multiple difficulties, or exploration based raiding; it should be noted that Savage difficulty does fit with the metrics of the highest difficulty raid in most MMOs. This could indicate that the formatting of FFXIV's raiding isn't indicative of its clear rate, but rather the problem is systemic to raiding and raid tuning itself at highest levels.

I think that once MMOs go to multiple raiding difficulties, the developers tend to intentionally design the hardest one so that only a small percentage of the players can beat it.

Midas is actually easier then gordias until A8S which is just a cluster F of overlapping mechanics. Even T9 which a lot agree is the hardest floor of the old coil is still easier then A8S. IMO

Definitely. I never did A4S without using the sac method or Savage SCoB, so I can't judge on those, but A8S is certainly more difficult than all of non-Savage Coil and all the rest of Alexander (including A3S and sac-method A4S).

[Zojha]

It's pretty consistent from one survey to the next that the most recent MSQ segment sees a significant drop off.

Uhm...In the table you provided, I see a total drop of about 7% for the latest step and 8% for the step before, with an even bigger drop off before that. I don't see any exceptional outlier at the latest step, but maybe I'm just blind.

In the census, the biggest total player drop is at 3.3 with 78350 difference. The biggest drop before that is between 2.55 and 3.0c at 61444.
In the table you provided, the difference is 13% for 2.55-3.0c and only 7% for 3.1-3.2. It's rather hard to compare since one is total numbers and the other percentages, but yeah...

(*Does some quick math*)
Okay. About 44% clear for 3.3. About 60% clear for 3.2. 63% for 3.1. It's even worse in percentages... don't do percentages people!