Raid buffs and combo actions should go.

[Azlith]

I have a buttload of opinions about what I want for this game and its direction. A lot of it is complete personal and biased as most opinions tend to be yet I try not to be that "guy" who's self-absorbed in their own takes they're blind to everybody elses. What I think its good isnt always true or best for the game imo. Wish more people can at least be a little more self-aware about this.

But you should be voicing your opinions on anything and everything that you want. You are not being "self-absorbed" by voicing your opinion on a topic. The devs want to here any and everybody's opinions on all matter of topics. That is quite literally what these forums were created for. The devs have plans to continue developing this game for at least another decade. If they did not want to hear the opinions of their players then they would simply shut down the discussion forums.

[R041]

Not only does FF compete with those games, it actively surpasses the very game you're directly comparing it to: Lost Ark. The estimated amount of active characters as of October 2022 is 1.45M. Using Steam as a reference is all but useless when it comes to FFXIV considering the overwhelming majority of players don't use it. Meanwhile, Lost Ark's own website literally directs you to their Steam page. There is no other option. WoW would see equally low numbers if it were to ever release on Steam for the precise same reason.

Okay, that's an actual delusional take if you think WoW's Steam Chart would even remotely mimic XIV's. Also I don't really trust the census when we all have multiple characters, and raiders have 2-3 just to get around gear lockout. This isn't active player information, it's achievement/mount information for CREATED characters. It shows only 4% characters even finished Endwalker a year after release. Are we counting the thousands of bots getting created and banned every 2 weeks too? (I doubt they delete those characters, they likely just ban them and keep the toon in the database. Check Lodestone for them.)

https://ffxivcensus.com/

No we don't have 1mil players, and there's no way we're hitting 100k concurrent. Maybe on expac release for a week, but doubt that many people could even login. lol

Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk. Okay I said 'Delusional', that's harsh. But the reality is we're not poppin' like you all think we are. We have absolutely terrible player retention, and if even half of this were true then Dynamis wouldn't literally be dead.

[Atelier-Bagur]

But you should be voicing your opinions on anything and everything that you want. You are not being "self-absorbed" by voicing your opinion on a topic. The devs want to here any and everybody's opinions on all matter of topics. That is quite literally what these forums were created for. The devs have plans to continue developing this game for at least another decade. If they did not want to hear the opinions of their players then they would simply shut down the discussion forums.

thast exactly it though. We can keep going between this back and forth "you're just trying to shut down this opinion" nonsense. How about we all just ignore such things and just focus on expressing our opinions without trying to downplay the other?

[Rolder50]

Okay, that's an actual delusional take if you think WoW's Steam Chart would even remotely mimic XIV's. Also I don't really trust the census when we all have multiple characters, and raiders have 2-3 just to get around gear lockout. This isn't active player information, it's achievement/mount information for CREATED characters. It shows only 4% characters even finished Endwalker a year after release. Are we counting the thousands of bots getting created and banned every 2 weeks too? (I doubt they delete those characters, they likely just ban them and keep the toon in the database. Check Lodestone for them.)

https://ffxivcensus.com/

No we don't have 1mil players, and there's no way we're hitting 100k concurrent. Maybe on expac release for a week, but doubt that many people could even login. lol

Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk. Okay I said 'Delusional', that's harsh. But the reality is we're not poppin' like you all think we are. We have absolutely terrible player retention, and if even half of this were true then Dynamis wouldn't literally be dead.

Another fun stat you can look at is raid logs, which is particularly applicable between FF14 and WoW because they use the same logging software. The DPS with the most logged kills in a 2 week period (Savage) in FF is SMN with 41k, and in WoW (Heroic) it's Demo Warlock with 98k. And WoW has twice as many DPS classes/specs soooo yeah.

[Azlith]

thast exactly it though. We can keep going between this back and forth "you're just trying to shut down this opinion" nonsense. How about we all just ignore such things and just focus on expressing our opinions without trying to downplay the other?

There have been plenty of people in this thread who disagree with the ideas I've presented. Should they just not voice their dissention? How does that help with discussing various aspects of the game? You can go on and not engage with debate all you want but when something happens that you don't like and you never even voiced your opposition then you will have no right to complain about it later. Letting someone know that you don't agree with their opinion and why is a very healthy thing to do, especially when it comes to video games.

Another fun stat you can look at is raid logs, which is particularly applicable between FF14 and WoW because they use the same logging software. The DPS with the most logged kills in a 2 week period (Savage) in FF is SMN with 41k, and in WoW (Heroic) it's Demo Warlock with 98k. And WoW has twice as many DPS classes/specs soooo yeah.

If that 41k for SMN includes killing the boss several times on one character, which I assume it does, then the numbers look even worse. There are quite a few people in this game who will kill the same boss hundreds of times in a week whereas in WoW I would assume that almost never happens. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Rolder50]

If that 41k for SMN includes killing the boss several times on one character, which I assume it does, then the numbers look even worse. There are quite a few people in this game who will kill the same boss hundreds of times in a week whereas in WoW I would assume that almost never happens. But maybe I'm wrong.

It would include multiple kills in both cases yeah. I can't think of many people in wow who would re-clear in the same week on one character, normally it'd be bring in the alt time.

[Semirhage]

Another fun stat you can look at is raid logs, which is particularly applicable between FF14 and WoW because they use the same logging software. The DPS with the most logged kills in a 2 week period (Savage) in FF is SMN with 41k, and in WoW (Heroic) it's Demo Warlock with 98k. And WoW has twice as many DPS classes/specs soooo yeah.

To play a little devil's advocate there, not all of those numbers are down to WoW being a *good* game. WoW exists in this odd state as "the" MMO. It's obtained a non-insignificant population of players who only either play WoW or wish they were currently playing WoW. All new decently budgeted MMOs experience a spike where they think they finally managed to capture WoW's audience, but they're so entrenched in WoW that all Blizzard has to do is wave something shiny, call it an expansion, and the people who spent an entire year bitching about Blizzard as the most awful company in the multiverse go crawling back. Every time.

[ForteNightshade]

Okay, that's an actual delusional take if you think WoW's Steam Chart would even remotely mimic XIV's. Also I don't really trust the census when we all have multiple characters, and raiders have 2-3 just to get around gear lockout. This isn't active player information, it's achievement/mount information for CREATED characters. It shows only 4% characters even finished Endwalker a year after release. Are we counting the thousands of bots getting created and banned every 2 weeks too? (I doubt they delete those characters, they likely just ban them and keep the toon in the database. Check Lodestone for them.)

https://ffxivcensus.com/

No we don't have 1mil players, and there's no way we're hitting 100k concurrent. Maybe on expac release for a week, but doubt that many people could even login. lol

Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk. Okay I said 'Delusional', that's harsh. But the reality is we're not poppin' like you all think we are. We have absolutely terrible player retention, and if even half of this were true then Dynamis wouldn't literally be dead.

Based on... your completely baseless and hilariously exaggerative assumptions? Of course it would mimic XIV's because the overwhelming majority of players interested in WoW would simply go to Blizzard's own website and download the game from there. Your entire argument is a massive cherry pick. Lost Ark is a game exclusively on Steam for the NA audience whereas FFXIV wasn't even available on Steam when it released.

As for the census. Lucky Bancho specifically curates the data to eliminate bots and inactive characters as best we can. Furthermore, Raiders do not have 2-3 characters. Only the very high end players even have one. Once again, you're making baseless assumptions you have zero data for. You aren't a raider yourself. So even based on hearsay, you have no metric to go off. Even at the high end, most raiders stop logging into their alts once splits are over. I haven't touched mine in two months. She actually wouldn't make the cut on LB's census.

You do realize FFXIV wouldn't be profitable if we were under a 100k subs essentially two weeks after a patch release, yes? And yet we have SE's quarterly data which reveals FFXIV has been the most profitable game Square Enix has outside its mobile division. It literally paid for FFVII: Remake, FFFXV and Kingdom Hearts 3. Just to illustrate this point further. 1.0 cost Square Enix 500 million dollars over a decade ago yet you're trying to insinuate an annual income of approximately 15M is sustainable in 2022?

At this point, I'm just going to say citation needed because literally everything you've said is complete nonsense. Even the site you linked, which is widely known to be inaccurate, still disproves your ridiculous assertions previously of servers having only 2,000 active players. There's talking out of your butt.

[Rolder50]

To play a little devil's advocate there, not all of those numbers are down to WoW being a *good* game. WoW exists in this odd state as "the" MMO. It's obtained a non-insignificant population of players who only either play WoW or wish they were currently playing WoW. All new decently budgeted MMOs experience a spike where they think they finally managed to capture WoW's audience, but they're so entrenched in WoW that all Blizzard has to do is wave something shiny, call it an expansion, and the people who spent an entire year bitching about Blizzard as the most awful company in the multiverse go crawling back. Every time.

Oh I'm not trying to get into why this is the case or offer an opinion on it. Merely helping point out that the other poster asserting wow would have bad steam numbers is a little suspect.

[ForteNightshade]

Oh I'm not trying to get into why this is the case or offer an opinion on it. Merely helping point out that the other poster asserting wow would have bad steam numbers is a little suspect.

Because you're missing the argument. WoW would have low Steam numbers relative to those downloading directly from Blizzard because there's no benefit to using a third party platform. Hence why FFXIV's Steam numbers are low. You are far better off going through Square Enix directly than Steam. Which the overwhelming majority of players do.