Thread: 18.5% drop in players in only 8 weeks

Originally Posted by TheOperator3712

There is no "normal ebb and flow". You can see this if you go back and look at what past surveys said. ShB had a massive influx of players at this point of its expansion, and SB had massive DDoS attacks that were expected to be decreasing the player count. I tried to find similar data for 3.45, but there was not a survey conducted by LuckyBancho for 3.45. To your point about expansion announcement driving an increase in player count, 5.45 included the announcement of EW muddying the data, and the trend from 4.4 to 4.5 saw an increase after the end of the DDoS attacks(4.45) followed by a small drop with the release of 4.5.

Case in point, there is no such thing as a normal pattern, because we don't live in a vacuum with normative conditions. Events outside the game are important driving factors to the game's population that prevent accurate comparison to supposedly similar points across time.

PS From a data analysis perspective, the hype train for ShB did not begin until after patch 4.55.

The last tier of the expansion always sees the biggest drop in XIV. The only reason ShB blew up the way it did before EW was because the WoW crowd was pissed off and XIV has a really generous trial.

This is completely normal.

Originally Posted by Ransu

The last tier of the expansion always sees the biggest drop in XIV. The only reason ShB blew up the way it did before EW was because the WoW crowd was pissed off and XIV has a really generous trial.

This is completely normal.

The sample size isn't big enough for there to be a normal. XIV has had a total of five x.45 patches to date. We have census data for the x.4-x.45 period for three of those five patches. All three of those periods also had uncontrolled outside factors that impacted them to unknown extents. An 18.5% drop could be the same as, better, or worse than previous x.45 patches, but without a control there is no way to know for certain.

"Case in point, there is no such thing as a normal pattern, because we don't live in a vacuum with normative conditions. Events outside the game are important driving factors to the game's population that prevent accurate comparison to supposedly similar points across time."

And on the note of the generous free trial, free trial players did not and do not count in the LuckyBancho Census. So any WoW Refugees that did not convert over to paying players would not have been reflected in the ShB Census data that I pulled up to make my first reply.

Originally Posted by Ivtrix

Forgive my ignorance but isn’t the significant contribution to the number loss players that are not maxed?

Isn’t the loss rate for maxed players something like 3%?

Seems like to me that it’s more the casual player who isn’t as invested is going to play other games like Zelda, ff16, Diablo, armored core when it comes out and continue xiv at their own pace.

Is this just a cope?

The census is specifically designed to check for that, and it also doesn't count most characters that are below level 60 to filter out free trial characters.

Using Google Translate you can see that the relevant statistics to answer your question were provided:
"The number of active characters decreased by 260,000 from the previous game (1,390,000) to about 1,130,000 .
The number of new characters is about 80,000 , down about 20,000 from the previous 100,000 .
The number of returning characters who were inactive last time but became active this time is 160,000, a decrease of 270,000 from the previous 430,000 .
The number of characters that are active and continuing from the last time is about 880,000, an increase of 30,000 from 850,000 .
Akatsuki starts at 1.01 million (down 100,000) . The Akatsuki level cap reached 850,000 (down 40,000) . Akatsuki clear is 780,000 (down 30,000) ."

Akatsuki seems to be what the Japanese name for Endwalker translates to when put through Google Translate.