We lost 70% of our player base half a year in

[DPZ2]

You're on Gilgamesh.

And you're not. So?

My alts on Seraph experience queue times that are equivalent to those on Gilgamesh for Roulettes. It is a bit sparse at 7 am CDT but picks right up after about 4 pm CDT on weekdays.

I remember 15-20 minute queue times for instances back in ARR. I experience 5-8 minute queue times for instances now that Endwalker is out on Seraph during prime time. Last evening, the population peak on Steam was 26,596. This morning, when I would suppose the majority of players are off to work, the average sampled 37 minutes ago is 14,041. It's almost as if the number of players in-game fluctuates with the daily life cycles of its players.

[Stormpeaks]

And you're not. So?

My alts on Seraph experience queue times that are equivalent to those on Gilgamesh for Roulettes. It is a bit sparse at 7 am CDT but picks right up after about 4 pm CDT on weekdays.

I remember 15-20 minute queue times for instances back in ARR. I experience 5-8 minute queue times for instances now that Endwalker is out on Seraph during prime time. Last evening, the population peak on Steam was 26,596. This morning, when I would suppose the majority of players are off to work, the average sampled 37 minutes ago is 14,041. It's almost as if the number of players in-game fluctuates with the daily life cycles of its players.

Ok now I know you're trolling, thank you

[Arc_of_Fire]

People have been saying make healers more engaging since Shadowbringers, and it’s been ignored.

People have been saying endgame is horrible with lack of content and it’s been ignored.

People want better hairstyles and headgears on the new races and it's been ignored.

After an ENTIRE year of receiving player feedback and FAILING to do what the community wants, now we have them scrambling to fix critical bugs after bugs like the housing lottery bug.

What a joke.

I wanted FF14 to thrive, I loved Stormblood but the game is dying and on it’s way out.

Square Enix, changes need to be made FAST.

NOT in 7.0, NOT in 8.0, it needs to happen THIS EXPANSION or you WILL lose the remaining player base.

I still have a queue when I log in. Albeit only about like 10 seconds. Do you think that even though the drop is that much in one year that this trend will continue in one years time or do you think it will level off?

[Ransu]

To be fair that green is the release of patch 6.3 on january 10th.

If anything it shows that players do return to the game for a fresh patch, but the player retention is very low as within a month 13.61% of the STEAM playerbase had basically stopped playing.

If a patch that lasts for 4-6 months cannot retain the playerbase within a single month, then there are certainly issues and it does need to be addressed.

Its consistently within the same range of player count for over a year. Even if the OP wasn't a troll and was trying to make some weird point, the steamcharts still show overall that the active numbers remain consistent and just have simple highs and lows between patches which is completely normal for a pve focused game.

How is coping going for you ? The game isnt "thriving", and no matter how much you and the other few keep trying to deny it, steam charts are a very good sample, the only way it wouldnt be a good sample is if you can provide evidence that people playing on standalone and consoles have entirely different activities in the game, which they dont, everyone does a bit of everything in this game. The fact you cant prove that makes the sample from steamcharts valid.

Too bad for you that xivcensus and lucky bancho completely go against your argument. Both show the game is healthy and active. Steamcharts showing small drops between patches is far from being some weird proof that the game isn't thriving.

[Stormpeaks]

I still have a queue when I log in. Albeit only about like 10 seconds. Do you think that even though the drop is that much in one year that this trend will continue in one years time or do you think it will level off?

I think you havent seen the hundreds of bots under the main cities, have you ? Here is a little sample : https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ed_by_like_50/ and this goes for every main city.

You can imagine that every time these guys spam log ins, it'll create a queue, even my server Sagittarius which is a new world that is low population sometimes has 25 people in queue at 4 AM, which is impossible as the world is empty or close to empty at night

Steamcharts showing small drops

-13.61%
-7.37%
-5.60%

? I guess -25% over 3 months is thriving in your eyes, sure I guess ?

[R041]

My alts on Seraph experience queue times that are equivalent to those on Gilgamesh for Roulettes. It is a bit sparse at 7 am CDT but picks right up after about 4 pm CDT on weekdays.

Your alts? Doing what, ARR content? lol

Yeah, everything but Aether is spammed with Free Trial toons, bots, and housing alts. So ARR is poppin'.

I think you havent seen the hundreds of bots under the main cities, have you ? Here is a little sample : https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ed_by_like_50/ and this goes for every main city.

They're easy to find when you do a Player Search. This is only when they're just getting ramped up again and aren't hiding in instances. They take up more than half of Marilith's population sometimes.

[Stormpeaks]

They're easy to find when you do a Player Search. This is only when they're just getting ramped up again and aren't hiding in instances. They take up more than half of Marilith's population sometimes.

Exactly, there are so many of them, without all of those bots logging in and out all the time, there would barely be queues if ever, but they keep logging in and out 24 7.

[UkcsAlias]

? I guess -25% over 3 months is thriving in your eyes, sure I guess ?

Call of duty drops by 75% in 3 months, which nearly every game does after a major release (in this case it was the new season pass that caused the spike). FF only dropped 66% (most of it was within the first 3 months) and now has a quite stable playercount for a year. Its realy not that bad as you make it sound.

If you can compare the numbers with call of duty, it says the game does decent. Its just that FF has the general numbers only at 25% compared to call of duty on steam (but call of duty is more popular, so its base numbers are higher anyway). Take numbers into context and they suddenly arent showing such bad result. Idealy you want the CSGO state (which shows a rise over time), but thats not realy a game to truly compare with considering how CSGO is a highly competetive game for a very long time and doesnt realy rely on season passes as much.

Every story based game that has a low content endgame has this same cycle with patches. But as long as that cycle is consistent, its healthy. Sure, you want better, but its not like the game is suddenly going to die either. It shows the game has a healthy core of players. But its very hard to make a game better on that. Normaly the way to do this is going competetive, but for a story oriented game, that would be a killing move to do (makes the current core leave, and makes the game vulnerable to competition with other games).

WoW isnt much better on this, its just that blizzard doesnt show it, and also has skewed numbers because you need multiple characters (which they also use as measurement, which means dedicated players often have several chars - and they use chars, because with actualy players the numbers would be horrifying).

[Saraide]

I still have a queue when I log in. Albeit only about like 10 seconds. Do you think that even though the drop is that much in one year that this trend will continue in one years time or do you think it will level off?

Login queues like they are right now arent because the servers are full but because the servers take their time before letting you in.

[Iyrnthota]

There's some really neat data in that steamchart graph for all time tbh.

It's interesting seeing a steady growth over time, with each new expansion having a greater and greater peak comparative to it's baseline player base.

Then you have the aberrant peak July 2021, which I think is that Summer where we had that perfect storm of Covid, lockdowns, and that WoW exodus shining a spotlight on the game.

In fact, it's almost an expansion level growth in player count.

Coming in late, so I expect someone's already ran the numbers, but I ran up some back of the envelope stats myself that I thought were interesting so I figured I'd share.


Percentage drop off from Expansion release to 1 month before x.4 release (assuming 6.4 May release):

HW - 43% drop off
ST - 60% drop off
ShB - 42% Drop off
EW - 65% Drop off

Percentage increase in player count between Expansion releases:

HW > StB - 215%
StB > ShB - 161%
ShB > EW - 231%


If you count that summer peak as an "expansion" then the numbers look like this:

ShB > Summer Peak - 163%
Summer Peak > EW - 142%

So that Summer influx of players was actually a larger increase than the player count from Stormblood to Shadowbringers.


On a personal note, I think the player count look pretty good here if we're being honest.
There's been a clear upwards trend since Shadowbringers release, and it looks like we've actually managed to retain quite a significant amount of the new players that have joined since then due to EW release and pandemic factors, given that those things do tend to have quite a significant drop off in returning players after the "trend" has died down.