Raid buffs and combo actions should go.

[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.