Quote Originally Posted by LittleImp View Post
It's reached a point where even Steamcharts probably provide a more solid overview of at least the broader trends. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the highs and lows of the last two expansions, proportionally.
Steamcharts have been showing a pretty steady decline for several months but nobody wanted to believe it because they're used to Steamcharts being used by bad actors to show them just the small player count and not the actual player trends. It's reasonable to assume that trends among steam's players are affecting regular-launcher players as well, barring some freak accident with the steam launcher that ruins their ability to play or something. I'm glad Bancho has put out their own similar results, because it lets us finally get on the same page about the current situation.

I actually think that dude on page 1 is right though. In ShB I recall it being pretty deadish until EW got announced, and then it picked up again. Loads of people just drop the game during the lengthy in-between periods where nothing's happening. The real issue though, is EW was hyped as the finale to a 10 year old story so it saw a LOT of people coming back to see how things wrapped up. Whereas 7.0 is some new chapter entirely, and the story building up to it has been hit or miss. Whether or not people will return for more of that, especially after the poor taste post-EW left in so many mouths, is anyone's guess. I think the devs might seriously freak out if they announce 7.0 and the game continues to lose players due to how they've bungled and mismanaged post-EW at every turn. Like, yeah, go ahead and keep putting obvious content items in the cash shop while the base game grows cobwebs, act more and more like ActivisionBlizzard and this is where it gets you. On the bright side, if that happens, the fear of failure might push them to actually churn out some quality content instead of chilling and being content. But with how their roadmap works, the bulk of the content's already been made by now so it's too late to change course anytime soon.

idk, idk. If I'm being real honest, I'm betting a shit-ton of people will come back for 7.0 just out of habit. The current MMO landscape is so barren that XIV can basically be mediocre and still be better than most, which is really all they need to do to keep players and make money. Eh.