Racial distribution, July 2021 (Luckybancho)

[Big_Bap]

To be fair:
- Lucky Bancho doesn't post his reports monthly. He does it once per 3 months.
- We don't know how exactly he fetchs this data, so we can't say if he does it in a single day or not.
- It takes several days to form report itself (data was aquaired at July 13th, but report was posted at 18th), so by the moment report is public it's already a little bit outdated.

That said, I think there're no ways to get 100% correct data anyway - the only people who has it are SE themselves. Reporters like Lucky Bancho just provide us some general data that helps to understand the direction in which the game goes with some trends in content and other things. So yeah, it's an estimate with some errors to it (or innacurate bur reliable in a good faith, as you called it).

Being outdated is not the problem.

He is most definitely using website scraping to get the information out of the Lodestone. That process is automated and the lodestone being absolutely horrible when it comes to loading pages, it is very frequent to end up with loading errors. Those errors are not a big deal... if he even cares to scrape those pages again (we don't know if he does). Then there's also the reliability of his crawlers. How frequently does the information that is being pulled from the lodestone is "saved" for the wrong character? Does he even bother to fix that? Does he do any kind of data validation? Cross-references with previous character history?

I do the very same thing he does with Free Companies and it takes a solid week to come up with a report that is 99.99%/100% accurate.

You are correct about trends, but your original post didn't contain such nuance.

[Puremallace]

Do you know the specific date range or is it July 1st till now? I do not read Japanese. Just wonder because Yoshia did specify in the last 2 weeks to be the major spike.

[Lauront]

Do you know the specific date range or is it July 1st till now? I do not read Japanese. Just wonder because Yoshia did specify in the last 2 weeks to be the major spike.

It's between each reading. The prior one was in April I believe, and this one spans up to 13/07/2021. It won't capture any characters which don't meet its criteria, which will very likely include those from the last few weeks.

For historic context - there wasn't much difference in April's reading IIRC:

The data was aquired at July 13th. Previous survey was posted at April, 11th. Keep in mind that Lucky Bancho doesn't count characters with level lower than 61 as active, so all players that started playing in last two weeks and/or are playing with Free Trial aren't included in his statistics. As such, the real amount of actively playing people is higher that 1.2 million, but they aren't counted due to not meeting requirements.

Exactly. This is, if anything, a conservative estimate.

[ICountFrom0]

Lack of mounts is being used as bot detection though.

[Larirawiel]

Luckybancho has also updated the statistics.

https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurvey_en.htm


Cheers

[Halivel]

Luckybancho has also updated the statistics.

https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurvey_en.htm


Cheers

109 787 Male Viera
107 559 Male Miqo'te (upd. Iteresting to note that their number didn't suffer as much is we thought it would. July's active playerbase by luckybancho was 1 207 441 players, while December is 1 032 426, which is fairly close. Meanwhile the number of active male Miqo'te dropped by 20k which is... significant, I suppose, but isn't all that much honestly. It means that majority of male Viera drifted from other races).

102 540 Female Viera (this number being lower than males' is, most likely, due to males being a fresh addition, while females are here for two years by now so they already have their solid playerbase)

Seems to be far closer to the truth than weird 30k Female Viera next to 50k Male Viera on FFXIV Census. Will be interesting to see how picture will shift closer to 6.1 and onwards.

[Reksanden]

I was somewhat tempted to change, but I'd miss the goofy expressions Male Miqo make too much.

Some friends actually made and lost a bet, because of that.

[Rokke]

Luckybancho has also updated the statistics.

https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/wsurvey_en.htm


Cheers

go bnuuy go :D

[Shougun]

Honestly I think the Hroth did well, they were always to be a bit of a niche race but also imo an important addition. Say for example SE, if they wanted purely popular choices, should only ever add pretty races but if you had done that then your actual diversity of choice (minor variations of super model) would be fairly bad. You don't want to focus on niche only, but it's important to have occasionally. Of course Roe were big bricks already but they didn't have a 'beast' race. Surely adding Night Elf with red, Night Elf with darker purple, Night elf with. . etc, is going to be popular choices, but I don't think it adds as much value as it does when you're missing whole sections of diversity. Races like Hroth are more to fill voids of space and contrast, rather than fill the majority of space.

With female, I'm curious how it'll do. Very good potential to outstrip Roe, maybe Elezen too even; although, female beast race would be probably one of the least popular so if they don't make them 'pretty' maybe not Elezen. That said them actually maintain a decent amount of beast would be a nice opportunity for those who never felt they had that option before.

If anyone thought Hroth, or races like it, were ever going to be #1 then I think it was an entirely missed concept of what a race like it was for purpose. It was particularly for diversity of visual and option, not supermodel but X. Supermodel but X is always going to win if we're just going what majority would pick. Which also I believe extends in value, when you're limited in resources at least, by the nature that varied races allow each other to contrast. Rather than a party of purely pretty girls and boys, which I think would make things blend and be more bland a rare dab of "other" allows a strong visual contrast (which would also relate to the importance of silhouettes). Honestly I think of it much like composing an art piece in general (as I sometimes describe story and other concepts) as I feel it works very well, it's true certain pieces of the composition are going to be focused on more than others but simply having it be only that thing can tend to be a mistake.

All that said, mostly because I see sometimes, not so much here, people missplace the importance of such options, I think a really, very, valuable thing would be stronger creation options (separating things whenever possible, completing customization options that were removed to save memory, etc). The amount of work to add proper sliders, at this point, would probably be insane and unreasonable but maybe in the next game (if not this one) - ... I think that would add potentially a fantastic diversity to everyone. Thicc Au Ra female, slender Hroth male, etc. Certainly not a simple thing to do though. Yoshida did mention the Au Ra concept art recently, ish, and I would love to see that race as I thought it was /very cool/ (and I loved the art for both genders) - also given the current Au Ra setup, and the thought of the concept art, I would imagine it might even be a 'highly diverse' yet also popular race (given the males would be even more dragon like, dragons are cool, everyone loves dragons lol, and the females being both succubus like which is a little bit of an untapped 'super model' vibe).

Though of course when thinking of "last race" or what have you (which may as well be female hroth) ... the stakes would feel higher. Like I see some wanting tiny furry race, which could be cool. I'm sure nothing is simple or easy, especially given the concerns for memory we are already aware SE has, but I wonder if adding an extra 'clan' might be one thought. Like Lala could have a long lost fluffy clan (basically moogle), Au Ra's might be that draconic / demonic succubus like race, Hroth might get one that's a bit slender and upright (maybe more akin to that one tiger primal boss), etc - sharing a lot of bones (when possible), animations, and other assets to make one final great push.

It is a bit unfortunate that some of the clan options are so similar, unlike say I think Hyur Highlander vs babylander is a great example of a fun opportunity as opposed to more of a color difference that is pretty common. On that vein of more customization though I know some have mentioned like Garlean race options, and if you had greater variety of control in creation you might be able to make a highlander male with the scale of the royal garlean like appearance - the fun one may have if there was a bit stronger ability to manipulate your creation (of course... also probably a higher ability to make some nightmares... lol)

[Lauront]

*snip*

I am quietly hoping this graphics engine upgrade he touted (yes, it's all very tentative and caveated) may result in some big broadening of character customisation options - body type sliders would be ideal but perhaps unattainable - then again, they plan for the game to last for quite some time, so who knows really?

At the least though, it does look like they are taking the texture upgrades seriously; a project they had said before would be very resource-intensive, but perhaps they found a satisfactory way to handle it.