Time to Quit

[LU_K]

I don't plan on leaving but the current direction is making me itch for the next FF online game or a FFXIV/ WOW Killer. I love this game a lot but everyone's opinions and frustrations are valid.

[Deo14]

You...can't be serious, can you?

1) There are no numbers with "what the FFXIV tag brings up on Twitter". "a lot"? How many? 1? 50? 500? 1,000? 1,000,000? How is this "data"?
2) "anecdote is not data".
3) Can you offer evidence that the majority of FFXIV's playerbase is even on Twitter?
4) Can you show the number of them that post on Twitter?
5) Can you show the number posting "Second Life" on Twitter, and what percentage that is of the playerbase?
6) Twitter, in general, represents only a small segment of society, and studies have shown that around 80-90% of posts are made by only around 2% of Twitter users to begin with. Did you know that?

No?

Then that's not data. That's not useful to a discussion. "A few hundred" - in a game played by between 1 million and 3 million people? 100 is 0.01% of 1,000,000. 500 is 0.05%. You need 10,000 to get to even 1% of the playerbase. Can you find 10,000 individual FFXIV posters on Twitter all posting Second Life topics? I doubt you can. And even if you could, that would be at best 1% of the playerbase, hardly a majority. And that's if we lowball the playerbase at 1 million instead of 2 million or 3 million (I think around 1.7-1.8 million is the general ballpark of active player by various estimates.)

In short, you contest data with "look at Twitter".

That's like contesting serious policy debate with "Read the President's Twitter rage takes".

Just some quick maff. FFXIV has supposedly roughly 1.3M of active players daily. GW2 has about 3x less than that (it's a little bit more complex than that, since GW2 doesn't have such an insane drop off in patches like FFXIV does). None the less, GW2 has in game a number of currently logged in players. This number at any given time is over 100K.

GW2 daily players = very roughly 500K
GW2 active players at any given time = 100K
FFXIV daily players = 1.3M
FFXIV active players at any given time = 1.3M / (500K/100K) = 260K

Mare active players at any given time = 20K afaik (maybe some degens could correct me if I'm wrong)

20K/260K = 7.7%

So 7.7% of players are high tier degens using mare. There is also mid tier degens not accounted here, of course.

Obviously half of these number are rough estimates, but even in better cases, we will end end up with more than 3% of players being absolute degens who use mare.

If you don't believe significant part of this community is into ERP, just look at all the mod websites, and follow the rabbit hole into 10s and 100s of 10K+, or even 100K+ ERP discords.

[Lauront]

If that 1.3m figure is from the LB surveys, they measure as little as a single login, for a character, meeting its criteria within the survey period, which is acknowledged to be susceptible to bloat by free login campaigns. It's more that it's a high point/maximum during the survey period as opposed to anything that could be used as an active daily figure, which I'd strongly doubt is anything like 1.3m. There's some other sites (not talking about ones which actually record live player metrics) that claim to estimate the numbers for it but I doubt it's based on anything reliable.

I'd say the fact that - as another poster so kindly pointed out - at least 20000 players are using a specific lewd mod counts as a 'significant number' when there is content designed to appeal to a far lesser number of players.

I think it'd be quite the interesting experiment for Square Enix to ban mods altogether as of 7.0 and prevent them from being launched, if only to see how many players actually stick around to continue playing the game as intended.

Yeah I'd be interested to see how that'd go as well, including in terms of their accounts...

[Deo14]

If that 1.3m figure is from the LB surveys, they measure as little as a single login meeting its criteria within the survey period, which is acknowledged to be susceptible to bloat by free login campaigns. It's more that it's a high point/maximum during the survey period as opposed to anything that could be used as an active daily figure, which I'd strongly doubt is anything like 1.3m. There's some other sites that claim to estimate the numbers for it but I doubt it's based on anything reliable.

Yes, unfortunately, there's not many reliable sources. From multiple sources, it seems that GW2 is roughly 1/3rd or 1/4th the size of FFXIV. That 100K active players is reliable number, so this should put FFXIV at around 200K-500K active players at any give time.

Which would get us at around 4% - 10% of players using mare. In case that mare statistic meant daily active players, and not active players at any given time, that would make it 0,8% to 2%. But just as others mentioned, exact numbers are not relevant, you just need to look in and outside the game to see what's happening.

[caffe_macchiato]

Which would get us at around 4% - 10% of players using mare. In case that mare statistic meant daily active players, and not active players at any given time, that would make it 0,8% to 2%.

There are the same number of Mare users at any given time as there are Steam users. While SE doesn’t reveal sales data, it’s hard to believe that Steam only accounts for 4-10% of active players.

[Heavenchild]

People forget that the avarage videogameplayer today is 30+.
Of course adults think about such things. And they do also when they are online. I am not into this scene but I don't care if adults enjoy their erotic chattings.

[ElysiumDragon]

I burned out on Savage raiding due to P8S, but I haven't quit the game and announced it on the forums several times. All that's changed is that I'm not logging in the second I wake up, or every day, but instead playing other games, like Baldur's Gate 3 or Persona 5 Royal. I'm several weeks behind on my gearing, and I honestly couldn't care less. When the urge to no-life the game comes back, I'll do so then.

[Hyperia]

I burned out on Savage raiding due to P8S.

Yea, same here, I took a pass on the rest of raiding after finally clearing P8S. Instead of being super happy that my static cleared, it was more of a feeling like “thank god it’s over”. It feels like the current Savage mentality is that they are making things near ultimate hard and forgetting the fun parts. Don’t get me wrong, there are fun parts but overall it feels unnecessarily long and too hard for what it is supposed to be.

[Renathras]

I'd say the fact that - as another poster so kindly pointed out - at least 20000...

1) We have hard data proving this number?

2) So that's between 0.5% and 1% of the playerbase. What about the other 99%?

Why does a hard number matter?

Because people are making arguments it's a significant amount, or even majority, of the population. You need actual numbers to substantiate such a claim.

Do you actually mean to dispute that a lot of ppl use this game for...

I don't doubt "a lot" do. But that's irrelevant. A lot of people die from the common flu each year. In the US alone, generally around 40,000 people. Which sounds terrible. Until you realize the US has a population of around 330,000,000 (330 million) people, and that is around 0.012%, meaning we shouldn't all live in fear of this disease, even though it does kill "a lot" - 40k is "a lot" - of people.

Now suppose someone argued that most people die of the flu every year, and that if all those people were removed from the equation, it would have a huge impact on the nation. Well, then it matters how many that is relative to the whole. That is, what percentage it actually is. If one is to make sweeping statements like that, they have to be able to provide numbers, hard and trustworthy ones, and they have to support their claim of being a significant portion of the playerbase.

Even the 20,000 people - "a lot" indeed - is between half and 1% of the playerbase (assuming 1-2 million, which is a pretty solid ballpark estimate of the size of the playerbase right now). That's pretty insignificant.

...

1) Going to need some sources for those numbers.

3) 7.7% is hardly a majority, and as even you note, rough estimates.

3) 3% is also hardly a majority.

4) Define "significant". I see a lot of rough math without sources, but it still supports the notion that this is a minority of people. Around 5% of voters in 2016 voted for the Libertarian party candidate. Needless to say, 5% is not a majority.

.

Anyway, I'd continue this discussion, but I'm the only one so far who has provided sourced data and apples-to-apples analysis, and now you guys are moving the goalposts - it went from:

If those people will leave, potential success of this game will lie with the Second Life players and those who sub for few months per expansion to do MSQ.

...holding that people that currently enjoy things are these Second Life players, To:

Do you actually mean to dispute that a lot of ppl use this game for...

You can't go from so many the game relies on them to "meh, 4-10%", without ever providing sources or hard data, and be arguing in good faith.

I presented two arguments:

1) The game is not dying, or even really stagnating. At worst, it's slightly growing. At best, it's growing rather well. The Steam numbers are the most pessimistic but still show this. The other numbers like Lucky Banchos suggest even more health/growth, and,

2) The ERP scene is pretty small compared to the whole playerbase. Even the source-less napkin math holds around 7-8%, which is a far cry from a majority. I've never argued that NONE EXISTS, so don't hit me with that "You're saying there is none?!" BS bad faith goalpost move.

I'm going to bow out as I made both points, and even the attempt to counter the second just proved it was, indeed, a pretty small minority and thus likely not leading SE's development efforts or design. Anything else that's a bad faith goalpost move I'm uninterested in entertaining. I made my case, and neither point has been disproven, with even the attempts to disprove the second supporting it by accident.

Yeah I'd be interested to see how that'd go as well, including in terms of their accounts...

I'd be fine with it, personally. I think most people care more about shaders and such than lewd mods.

I burned out on Savage raiding due to P8S, but I haven't quit the game and announced it on the forums several times. All that's changed is that I'm not logging in the second I wake up, or every day, but instead playing other games, like Baldur's Gate 3 or Persona 5 Royal. I'm several weeks behind on my gearing, and I honestly couldn't care less. When the urge to no-life the game comes back, I'll do so then.

Yea, same here, I took a pass on the rest of raiding after finally clearing P8S. Instead of being super happy that my static cleared, it was more of a feeling like “thank god it’s over”. It feels like the current Savage mentality is that they are making things near ultimate hard and forgetting the fun parts. Don’t get me wrong, there are fun parts but overall it feels unnecessarily long and too hard for what it is supposed to be.

So basically the Gordias problem?

[caffe_macchiato]

2) So that's between 0.5% and 1% of the playerbase. What about the other 99%?

Wow, Square Enix is a lot stupider than I thought. Did they really go through all the work of porting this game to PC and putting it on Steam only for 20,000 concurrent players to make up 0.5 to 1% of the playerbase?

Also, that means that there are two million (2,000,000) people playing FFXIV at any given time. That's more than Fortnite. You understand that FFXIV is by far the most popular online game of all time, right?

So where's our content?