Thread: 4.25 and beyond

Considering how well is received by the community anything that requires more than 5 mins to get I won't hold my candle for it happening anytime soon.

We all love this game, I've been on this ride since beta and fully support SE's venture into the mmo space and we know they like their formula- its making money and they are probably getting more new players than the few veterans that opt out, so its working well for them. I wouldn't say this game isn't great/successful, we're just pointing out what happens if you play it long enough on a monthly basis. I play it mostly on the weekends so I'm not asking for a 5 hour a day investment, but even then the types of battle content have become monotonous over the years. Now, I wouldn't want them changing how easy it is to get back into endgame activities, having easy accessibility is key in their success so gear ilevel update intervals are probably staying. So I don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess this is as good as it gets?

I just wish they would do something with the class balance and PVP balance, because that one is a pure joke.

Originally Posted by SavageCipher

A new area and gear....what are people really expecting? This isn't an expansion, its a minor patch.

Content with independent progression from the main game, that is slow and maintains long term progression goals. I think "most" which are bored would be happy with that.

Eh. I'm just looking forward to finally get my Amatera- I mean Lakshmi mount. Because, you know, having 150 or so blissful totems and only seeing the whistle drop twice is totally working as intended...

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

Originally Posted by Vhailor

Also, being second-highest compared to WoW really shouldn't be viewed as successful in the year 2018. World of Warcraft dwarfs the number of subscribers for FFXIV, and it does so despite being roughly a decade-and-a-half old. That's sad, and it's a massive indictment of any company in the MMO space that isn't creating an intentionally niche title - SE first and foremost, given their shameless efforts to ape WoW early and often.

THIS, though, I have to call out as specious. Unless you have a magic line to both Blizzard and SE's real data, all you can go off of is the same inferential data everyone has access to.. which doesn't particularly agree with any estimates of 'dwarfing'.

Publisher numbers are, as a rule, complete and absolute nonsense. FFXIV claimed to hit 5 million subscribers in 2015, which is about as transparently unrealistic as Blizzard's old eternally optimistic subscriber numbers - there are a lot of real questions that have never been answered about how these numbers are reached, what really counts as an 'active' subscriber (there's a lot of reasons to suspect Blizzard's CN numbers in particular were always inflated), and how those numbers reflect in the real world. The observed estimates suggested a number of active player accounts somewhere in the 1.5m-2.5m range for WoW in mid-late 2017 - a pretty wide sweep, but getting there requires a lot of assumptions based on revising backwards from numbers of players seen online and Blizzard's own quotes about percentages of the player base that have completed content. A fun extra question is 'how many of those are propped up by tokens and would dissolve without paying players supporting them', but that's outside the scope of this discussion.

Now to FFXIV. The NA/EU/JP 'active characters' count from the censuses tends to hover around the 400k-600k mark - the high end for characters who are at least >50% through Stormblood, the low for characters who are caught up on the MSQ, based on different indicators. Alts are a thing in this game but much less of a thing than in WoW - so it's much more reasonable to draw an inference from that number. Let's assume - again conservatively, I suspect - that 75-80% of these active accounts are single-character. That gives us a baseline somewhere between 300k-500k, realistically somewhere around 1/6th to 1/4th the population. Smaller, yes, that was always a given, but 'dwarfing'? And that's certainly not a full count - how many non-RMT accounts are slowly chipping through the game, or roleplayers who don't put a priority on topping out? Hard to say. CN and KR are also operated by third party providers and I'm not sure if there are any unofficial censuses that include their data (please let me know if there are!).

In the MMO market, 'less than WoW' is not a failure - WoW is a colossal, unprecedented outlier that was guaranteed to live forever off of sheer inertia. Its like will - and I feel pretty confident saying this - never be seen again, barring some kind of equally completely unprecedented shift in MMO technology. Maybe the first real AAA brainjack-VR MMO. Maybe.

Originally Posted by Sindele

I hate to be the local skeptic toeing the company line in this thread, but damn. Taking a break sometimes is okay! That's what they *want*, it's not a game that's really designed to have indefinitely gratifying content for people who have been playing 10 hours a day since release. Nor, frankly, should it; as that's an easy road to alienating more casual players (ie. 95%+ of the game's subscription base).

No, taking a break isn't a bad thing. Keep in mind that if you unsub for an extended period you lose your house however. What I do think is an issue is being able to sub for 1-2 months out of a 2year patch cycle between expansions and really miss nothing. I mean, its great for those that are happy with the game as is... all the power to those people. The progression systems in this game a very weak in comparison to other games. The narrative is the strongest part of this game imo.