September Census

[Simpicity]

The only number that matters to square and it's investors is the bottom line.

[Hyrist]

I don't think it's fair to try to justify bad content by trying to slice out players who aren't participating in it as 'not counting'. There are severe flaws in that argument aside from that pretense, the foremost of that is:

You don't need 3.3 to do Alexander.

No matter how you try to justify the percentage base even if you were to half the number of current 'applicable players' the percentage is miserable. The content just barely started to resemble something that narrow margin of raiders that established themselves back in Coil Era enjoyed. But we're forgetting that even Coil Era clears and participation was bad.

Seriously, quit defending raids. Pretty much everyone who raids has criticisms leveled against it - even those who are trying to say that they're not 'as bad'. Recognize the Stockholm syndrome and actually work to discuss improvements.

[Jynx]

Seriously, quit defending raids.

Oh I certainly hope nobody is defending them, people do however try to use the low clear rates to try and make it clear raids are just a waste of time to have in the game at all.

[Hyrist]

Oh I certainly hope nobody is defending them, people do however try to use the low clear rates to try and make it clear raids are just a waste of time to have in the game at all.

I don't think anyone's made that argument. I believe it's a difference of HOW we want to improve raiding and make it appeal to a wider subset of people than just the narrow sliver that's currently passing it.

And the low clear rates were based off of what, double the number of 'active' people we have? So we go form 1% to 2%. That's still not nearly enough.

IMO Raids, and honestly all content needs to be reanalyzed and broken down to the four serious pillar questions of what makes a MMO content successful, Enticement, Engagement, Accessibility, and Longevity - cause right now I don't see a lot of the current content adequately meeting these, even to their 'target' audiences respectfully.

That's not to say the game is bad, just ... missing the mark. And Raid's a huge culprit in that department.

[Zojha]

Maybe discrepancy is ppl that got achievement but never used minion to add it.

Well, LuckyBancho uses the minion tab on the lodestone to get his data, so if that was the case, it should be the one with the lower number. We have no idea how this one got its data, so.../huh.

The lodestone lets people hide much of their data so any data you get from it is immediately suspect.

IIRC, you can't hide minion data on there (feel free to correct me on that one) and there is little reason to assume someone would not add a free minion that clogs up inventory space to their repertoire - you can't even sell it after all, so what else would you do with it? That's why these surveys (typically) look for minions you get from certain quests to see how many people did it. I wager similar goes for things like race and GC affiliation.
I'm not particularly fond of using the latest MSQ step as activity criterion either, tho. In general, many things are locked behind the MSQ, so it's natural to assume an active player would follow it to some degree, but I know all too many people who didn't bother with Nidhogg normal because it got a bad wiping reputation and the only thing locked behind it is NidEx.

I don't think excluding pure crafters from the active player criterion is too bad, though - crafting is a solitary activity, not a group activity, so even if you had 20 million active crafters online at all times, queues for group content would suffer nonetheless. And the social value of procuring goods is entirely artificial, as all crafting exclusive goods could easily be sold by an NPC (we could name it Market Board!) instead - for the most part, the interaction partners probably wouldn't even realize the difference, as the market board already is how crafters interact with most people.

I believe it's a difference of HOW we want to improve raiding and make it appeal to a wider subset of people than just the narrow sliver that's currently passing it.

"As of late October, at least about 50% of players who are actively playing battle classes have completed all four parts of normal Alexander Gordias." - Yoshida in a Famitsu interview translation on 3.1.

Literally all it took for wider appeal was to reduce the difficulty and put it in DF. Which isn't surprising at all, because against what people claim, the difficulty has always been the cause for the low participation - even the requirement of fixed groups/statics is ultimately caused by the difficulty. So the answer to appeal is easy, obvious and empirically proven - people just don't like it, because it goes against what the content is meant to be in their eyes. Hence, hourlong debates how to fix a problem without touching the cause.

[Alien_Gamer]

I don't think excluding pure crafters from the active player criterion is too bad, though

The crafters i know spend time gathering their mats, crafting gear for friends and others, spend time helping friends go through some content, and in general act as part of their community. Crafting may be a solitary activity but they are not solitary people.

In a census designed to guess the number of ACTIVE PLAYERS, you don't get to exclude who is active because you think less of what they do. Anyone who plays several hours a day every day is an active player; it doesn't matter if they farm level 1 mobs, craft gear or do raids, they are active players. But this survey ignores them and thus gives a false reading of the numbers of players who are active.

Its a simple concept if your goal is to make a census of active players then you need to include ALL ACTIVE PLAYERS or your results are invalid. All this census is done has been to count how many people have used the minion from the end of the 3.3 MSQ. Which is fine, just stop pretending its more than that.

[Vantol]

Recognize the Stockholm syndrome and actually work to discuss improvements.

Oh, we did. Back and forth. To a degree that it became detailed "How to" instruction. But so far developers reaction was "Nope. Screw you".

[Alien_Gamer]

Another one of these threads? I love that people are trying to use actual data beyond "Nobody on my friends list logs in anymore, therefore the game is dying!" I hate that people are trying to make that data say something it doesn't.

The lodestone lets people hide much of their data so any data you get from it is immediately suspect. Taking what data is left on the lodestone and interpreting that to mean the game is dying is absurd. There simply isn't enough data to make that conclusion, all people are doing is confirming their own bias on this discussion.

Not everyone does end game raiding, not everyone does MSQ, not everyone does achievement hunting, not everyone gets all the mounts, not everyone gets all the minions. The fact is, the lodestone does NOT give you enough complete data sets to jump to any accurate conclusions. It doesn't even give you enough details to determine how to weigh partial data sets to draw correlations between them. This doesn't even touch on the reality that MMO subs have a cycle between patches/expansions and a give and take with other MMOs. All you have is assumptions and guesses, not actual evidence of anything.

For myself, I don't collect minions, I don't do end game raiding but I like the MSQ, I have leveled a lot of the classes but its been months since I've played anything thats not level 60. According to your methods I'm not an active player despite logging in almost daily.

Most of my friends are crafters and many of them don't care about the MSQ or mounts or raiding. According to your methods none of them are active players despite playing 6 hours a day, every day.

So...yeah...quit making these polls to confirm your bias that the game is in a bad state. They're inaccurate and misleading. Nothing short of SE giving us the data would enable us to draw any conclusions accurately.

[MrPresident]

This is just going to make everyone cry like the last one.

"This is all wrong! Everyone on the planet is playing this game at all times and if you say otherwise you're a troll!"

And so on.