Raid buffs and combo actions should go.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[R041]

...

I like how everything you're saying is just as baseless if we're going by all the same shitty data. lol

You know I was talking about concurrent players right? Not Active Subscriptions. Imagine if we reviewed Active Subscriptions for WoW vs XIV. It's easily 3-4x XIV.
You can have 1mil Subscriptions while also only having 70k concurrent players - Even though I don't believe we're even hitting 1mil subs. Maybe 300k? (Actually, we can't even determine that. Too many Free Trial)

I'm not saying we don't have a good amount of subs, if you read what I'm actually saying - I'm talking about how we don't actually retain player activity. So our concurrent numbers are really poor. People hop on, do their dailies for an hour then hop off. That's not very retentive gameplay.

So reviewing even the Steam Chart shows how shifted the percentages are for patch/expac release cycles, regardless of hard numbers. We can't honestly say the Chart's movement doesn't relatively reflect cross-platform. Do you believe we've retained activity steadily?

We're also not talking about the return SE gets on assets and consumables from the CASH SHOP and other stores.

[Ransu]

I like how everything you're saying is just as baseless if we're going by all the same shitty data. lol

You know I was talking about concurrent players right? Not Active Subscriptions. Imagine if we reviewed Active Subscriptions for WoW vs XIV. It's easily 3-4x XIV.
You can have 1mil Subscriptions while also only having 70k concurrent players - Even though I don't believe we're even hitting 1mil subs. Maybe 300k? (Actually, we can't even determine that. Too many Free Trial)

I'm not saying we don't have a good amount of subs, if you read what I'm actually saying - I'm talking about how we don't actually retain player activity. So our concurrent numbers are really poor. People hop on, do their dailies for an hour then hop off. That's not very retentive gameplay.

So reviewing even the Steam Chart shows how shifted the percentages are for patch/expac release cycles, regardless of hard numbers. We can't honestly say the Chart's movement doesn't relatively reflect cross-platform. Do you believe we've retained activity steadily?

We're also not talking about the return SE gets on assets and consumables from the CASH SHOP and other stores.

ForteNightshade is pointing to actual data from lucky bancho which is widely viewed as accurate census. You on the other hand are talking completely out of your ass.

[Azlith]

It seems the discussion is getting a bit off track. While I do think talking about player retention is related to the topic at hand it seems you guys are just arguing about whos right or wrong about speculative data on sub counts. If you're not going to bring the argument back to the topic of the thread could you please take it to another thread that would be more appropriate?

[Rolder50]

I agree. Back on topic, raid buffs are boring crutches for class design. I would like it if each class was unique and able to do good damage on their own. OR! I would like it if the raid buffs actually did something interesting. Having a buff that is just "Group does 5% more damage for 20 seconds" is just so unbelievably boring.