Time to Quit

[Renathras]

There's ample proof to be found by simply daring a look at what the FFXIV tag brings up on Twitter to see exactly what a lot of players use the game for.

As for players being 'pushed out', one only needs to look at how vocal members of this community behave if someone likes or dislikes the 'wrong' character or doesn't react the 'right way' to certain cutscenes.

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".

.

EDIT:

Again, I don't think the game's perfect. It's leaving a lot of potential content and players on the table by not developing more midcore content - something other MMOs have also failed at (for years, WoW was "raid scene and PvP" and nothing else). I think there's also room for both simple Jobs (like current SMN) and complex ones (like old SMN) in the same design space. Hell, old SMN had a 2 min rotations so would work with the 2 min meta system, even!

I think the solution is to change things up a bit, but keep the core, just adding to it. Cast a wider net, both to catch new fish and to give existing fish more room to swim within. I don't see anything wrong with that.

However, the notions that the game is dying or only held aloft by "Second Life" players is both insulting AND statistically invalid. The data does not support either claim.