Time to Quit

[Ivtrix]

And what is that "significant number"?

What is the "number" there? Is it 50? 500? A thousand? A million?

The developer who runs the horse mod where you can see other mods has estimated based on usage that 14% of the playerbase uses his specific mod. I can find you the discord post if you’d like. He’d be very in tune with player usage.

[MoofiaBossVal]

7.0 will make or break my interest in the game.

[AlienDiplomat]

Feeling the same way TBO. I actually haven't even made it through half the EW story for the 1st time too, so probably not for the reasons most people here express.

My big problem with this game is the housing system. SE is making BILLIONS of dollars across dozens of games. They sign these BS anti-consumer exclusivity deals excluding PC gamers from enjoying the new single player FF game that took tons away from the development of this product we pay for, just to grab at MORE money...

Yet they can't invest some MINIMAL dollars in some extra server space for instanced housing, and some sort of basic UI front-end for making friends lists of people's houses in your district you would like to appear in each of the plots in your instance?

Excluding 90% of your paying customers from a key feature of the game because you are too miserly to invest money in servers? Setting up this horrible lottery system (a less foul smelling turd is still a turd) which is just a once-per-week punch in the guts for the vast majority of you players who don't buy gold from farmers and spend hundreds of millions on FC flipping services to cheese the lottery to even have a fair chance at getting a house?

This is an absolutely disgraceful system and the fact they feel everything is perfectly fine has really destroyed my faith in the "we care so much *tear, sniff* public image of this company, I am seriously at the point where it is just time to consciously and emotionally uncouple.

I might stick around for 7.0... but I'm just... not sure at this point.

[Velvet_Lunarfang]

Feeling the same way TBO. I actually haven't even made it through half the EW story for the 1st time too, so probably not for the reasons most people here express.

My big problem with this game is the housing system. SE is making BILLIONS of dollars across dozens of games. They sign these BS anti-consumer exclusivity deals excluding PC gamers from enjoying the new single player FF game that took tons away from the development of this product we pay for, just to grab at MORE money...

Yet they can't invest some MINIMAL dollars in some extra server space for instanced housing, and some sort of basic UI front-end for making friends lists of people's houses in your district you would like to appear in each of the plots in your instance?

Excluding 90% of your paying customers from a key feature of the game because you are too miserly to invest money in servers? Setting up this horrible lottery system (a less foul smelling turd is still a turd) which is just a once-per-week punch in the guts for the vast majority of you players who don't buy gold from farmers and spend hundreds of millions on FC flipping services to cheese the lottery to even have a fair chance at getting a house?

This is an absolutely disgraceful system and the fact they feel everything is perfectly fine has really destroyed my faith in the "we care so much *tear, sniff* public image of this company, I am seriously at the point where it is just time to consciously and emotionally uncouple.

I might stick around for 7.0... but I'm just... not sure at this point.

I feel the same and they got feedback about the previous criterion dungeon and yet again Yoshi changed nothing for the new criterion. I can't understand why people still believe in this guy when he and his team been dropping the ball the last couple expansions

[Kisshu]

Kinda in the same group of 7.0 making or breaking my interest in the game.
Will tune in Friday and hope to see something interesting.
But if it ends up like the EW keynote where it felt like: Here's the setting, lets go over all the stuff that's identical with all other expansions but with a new flavor such as dungeons, here's a single slide on something called Island Sanctuary but we're not gonna talk about this for another year, we're doing something new with PVP but won't talk about that until just before 6.1, now lets talk 30 minutes about server travel ingame.

Basicly they need to show what's new in the expansion, not just the new coat of paint.
I want an experience like going from Chain of Promethia to Treasures of Aht Urhgan in FFXI, where we got a wealth of new content types (mainly Assault and Beseiged).

[AlienDiplomat]

I can't understand why people still believe in this guy when he and his team been dropping the ball the last couple expansions

I mean, it's not really like that for me. I still have a lot of respect for the team, YoshiP, Soken, all the creative people who contribute. It is still a really great game and I know they all have had a lot of passion for it over the years. I still feel you get way more content and attention to detail in this MMO than pretty much any other on the market. Certainly a lot more than WoW, "time gate everything to milk subs for minimal content while blaming the customer for complaining about the same team lead basically abandoning all aspects of the game other than spreadsheet simulating min-max raiding."

The thing is, housing is a core component of the game to my way of thinking. You can have the coolest game in the world, but if you neglect an essential core component so that maybe 20% of the population or less even get to participate and just leave it that way for years on end with no word, no communication... I mean think of it like a world class chef making the ultimate wedding cake, with absolute attention to detail given to every aspect, every layer... but then making every layer except the top maybe 10-15% or so out of cardboard underneath the pretty icing.

As nice as the whole thing looks, that is still going to leave 80+% of the guests with a pretty bad taste in their mouth.

[Rufalus]

Each new idea has been locked in a separate piece of side content that's only relevant during the expansion in which it debuted. All of those ideas could have been infused into the main content and core systems.

By now the normal dungeons could have been doing multi path selection (variant), RNG enemy spawns and traps (deep dungeon), rare loot to appraise (deep/fieldops), duty actions such as levitate (deltascape) and even mounted sections like praetorium used to have, all of those things in the core content that's supported by roulettes and thus never lacks participation.

Using those examples, our daily expert roulette could be more than just a trash pipe speedrun. There can be roaming mobs and randomized mobs that make each run different. There can be rare tradeable loot that's worth selling. There can be duty actions specific to each dungeon to do things like break through ice walls, levitate over lava/poison, reflect certain boss attacks back.

[DPZ2]

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

It might be an "interesting experiment", but no sane company CEO is going to approve such a move. The liability lawsuits would cripple any game company involved in such stupidity.

And fully encrypting network traffic between client and server could work, but if you're not already worried about ping you will be shortly after implementation.

Dream on though.

[Fortecael]

I officially joined the 7.0 make it or break it gang.

For a bit of a story I only resubbed to play the MSQ, see the new trial and pandemonium's ending. All of it. ALL. Was trash.

MSQ is literally another "We went to za void (again), we failed (again), we go back (again) and try again next patch lol (this is like the 4th time or what ?)", the Golbez fight was also the least interesting trial this expansion, which is saying a lot since Rubicante was just a reskinned Suzaku. The last good trial was Barbaricia, which was about 2 patches ago, hot damn.

And on this topic, the first 2 tiers of Pandemonium were cool, had interesting mechanics and were fun to watch, play and listen to. This tier is crap, in all departments, the mechanics all boil down to "Hahaha, gotcha" bodychecks, the bosses are literally who cares mobs, and do we really need another Themis fight ? Like, really ? Let him be already. And don't get me started on P12. E12 was visually impressive and fun to play (even on normal) but I don't have words to explain how disappointing P12 is.

I won't even go into all my complaints about no content, but at this point I feel robbed of $12, I literally played this patch for less than 12 hours, there's nothing to do, there's no worth in paying the sub.

I'm joining the 7.0 make it or break it gang.

[Renathras]

/sigh

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

Do you know the difference between "concurrent players" and "players"?

Suppose a nation has 100,000 drivers in it. But they aren't all on the road at the exact same time. Many are at work. Many are at home. Different people have different schedules. Despite a population of 100k drivers, there may only be 20k drivers on the road at peak times with various lesser amounts at other times. The nation still has 100k drivers. "concurrent" isn't relevant.

Note I didn't say "concurrent" anywhere. Look at what you just quoted.

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

Where, in that quote, is the word "concurrent"?

This is yet another example of the bad faith goalpost moves I keep talking about that I'm not interested in entertaining other than just soundly debunking you.

As you said yourself in the same message: "Going to need some sources for those numbers". My estimate with 7% is rough, but at least it's based on some sources.

...which are?

Like, I'm specifically asking for what your sources are, not for you to tell me you have some.

20K of all time active players

What do you mean by "all time active players"?

Is this the "concurrent players" bad faith goalpost move I just demolished the person above for making? Note also I said between 1m and 3m total playerbase. Not concurrent playerbase. And that's also not "more popular than any game"; WoW peaked around 13m, and quite a few random games like Runescape have had millions of accounts as well. 1-3m for one of the top MMOs on the planet isn't outlandish.

Your analogy is...

No, my analogy is accurate. If you're arguing that some group makes up a majority or significant portion of the population, the onus is on YOU to prove it. 5% isn't a majority, and it's not always even significant. I even pointed this out with my remark 5% of people in 2016 voted for the Libertarian candidate for US President, yet no one considers that a serious movement or significant portion of the population in any real sense of policy.

Also, give me source of that 1-2 mil, and once you do, I'll respond just like you, and tell you to give me hard data instead.

I'm not asking you for "hard data". I'm asking you for your source. What is your source? You keep saying you have one, yet don't actually link it.

Anyway, that's not the way this works. You don't get to make revealing your source contingent on someone else providing theirs (and I did anyway) in a debate or discussion or scientific paper or any kind of persuasive argument. Either you have a source or you don't, and if you don't and are saying you do, you're lying.

Again, YOU made a claim, so the onus is on YOU to prove it. YOU even said you had sources. But when asked, you don't reveal them. Which either means you don't have sources or you know they're questionable.

For my part, I've consistently pointed out we don't HAVE good sources. We know that several millions of people have created accounts, as SE has said so and we have no reason to dispute those numbers. But that's also a useless metric. "Created account" doesn't say if the person ever logged in, much less still plays the game. The most accurate metric we probably have since it's based on log-ins are the Lucky Bancho numbers, which fluctuate but tend to be between 1-2m, generally 1.5+/-0.3, or 1.2-1.8. It's not a perfect source, but probably the most reliable we have.

I've also used the Steam numbers - CORRECTLY - by comparing to the same time last expansion to see if we've had an apples-to-apples, "expansion on" growth or decline. Something no one has yet refuted either of the times I've presented it.

So there's my "sources". What are yours?

Oh, let me guess, you won't reveal them until I reveal some concrete super source?

...which means you have none or yours is untrustworthy and you know it, and you just refuse to admit you have none/it's untrustworthy. THAT is why you won't reveal it or put conditions on revealing it. If someone has good sources, they reveal them without being asked, or if not then, when asked. The only reason not to is duplicity. Either you don't have any and lied, you know the sources aren't good, or you think they are but want to string someone along without revealing your source proves them wrong and try to give them rope to hang themselves with before dropping your sources - entrapment, in other words - instead of just doing so openly and honestly to begin with.

None of those, btw, is a good look. All of them are bad faith. Some are just WORSE faith than others.

1) Averages of numerous sources which seemed okay.

...which ARE...?

(Also, not that you care - analytic rigor is clearly not of interest to you - but mixing different data sources into an aggregate is a touchy thing that has to be done extremely carefully since different types of data are not always compatible, and of those that are, often require weighting or multipliers played on various datasets to make them compatible; all of which introduce bias. It's a thing that even experienced statisticians have to be very careful with, not something to be done with "rough estimates" on the fly by someone with no intereste in analytic or academic rigor in their efforts.)

I acknowledged that I'm working with rough estimates numerous times, and that hard data are impossible to come by

Then you agree with me, as I've said the same thing several times.

2, 3, 4)

"significant" depends on your perspective. If we're talking less than 1 in 20 people in an MMO, that's not very significant at all.

And lol at "real life politics". I get it clearly debunks your argument so you're desperate for an out, but pointing out 5% isn't much of a given population isn't "politics". Note I didn't bring up any political issue, it's just an easy to point to statistic. I could point out 5% of people support X random thing in life but you'd probably question THAT too, so I'm using something easy to verify to make the point so you can't waft or try a bad faith dodge or derail.

If that is not significant to you, I don't know what is.

Again, significance to what?

If we're talking about the playerbase or the Dev's direction, then "significance" would be "a large percentage of the playerbase". 5% is not a large percent. If a company is going to cater to a specific part of the playerbase at the exclusion of all others, it's generally going to be more than 5%. And especially given FFXIV 1.0's history, Yoshi P and his team are very likely aware of how easy it is to mess up and more cognizant than most to avoid such a thing. (Whether they succeed or not is debatable, but arguing they're now only making the game for ERPers is just asinine.)

You haven't provided any...

Yes, I have.

I directly provided the Steam data, lest you missed it. The post with the picture? That's data.

I provided analysis of it, which wasn't "just completely off topic comparison of some 0.042% rare disease". (That was specifically debunking the argument the game was "dying" or "losing players" and "not growing").

Unlike your "rough estimates", that's hard data you can't argue with, and I provided apples-to-apples analysis of. Something the doomsayers never do, and instead of acknowledging when someone does it, they engage in personal attacks or bad faith goalpost moves.

And you can't go away from posting your source for that 0.5% - 1% claim of yours. Come on, I'll wait, I'm curious where did you get that number. Same goes for that random 1-2 mil you threw in.

I already said this? Not just in this post, but before now.

And, again, this is a dodge. This is you avoiding posting your own sources because you know they're suspect.

Again, when YOU make a claim, the onus is on you to prove it, not other people to disprove it. And trying to get off on a "I'll show you mine ONLY IF you show me yours first" mentality is disingenuous.

"My argument is so strong it will not even need further defending, I'm always right waaah" - Ren Shapiro, 2023

/yawn

And this is why I didn't want to engage with you and those like you. It's like arguing with a child. A very WHINY child.

No serious, competent, rational, or even vaguely respectful adult would type what you just did.

I'll take an L,

I highly doubt that. Though by all means, prove me wrong on it and take the L. I'll be OH so put in my place.

if they're not too long

Like this post of yours I'm responding to?

like one of his many deranged

Belittling insult again.

healer rants,

"Riveting." -Semi-perfect Cell, DBZ Abridged

.

Yeah, I debunked your arguments, of course your petty and refusing to offer sources.

Again: The game isn't dying, and your ERP number is a small fraction of the playerbase. Even by the most positive numbers for your argument, it's 10%, and by the less positive for your position, far less.

If you can't argue in good faith - and you can't - don't bother. And no amount of getting a dozen likes from every one of Titenmen's alts makes you any less bad faith and wrong.

.

You provided no sources, you didn't engage in argument, you engaged in insults and goalpost moves, both proving your bad faith. I've addressed your arguments - all of them - and you couldn't offer defenses. So instead, you went low and petty, and I've no interest in debate against one with such a mentality.