Thread: 18.5% drop in players in only 8 weeks

It's dying it's going to die! I am not gonna be surprised if the number goes up 40% when 7.0 gets announced. Just look at every game, it follows the same patterns.

Originally Posted by Rolder50

I find it a little astonishing that people make alts in this game. There is very little practical reason to do so and they take a ton of work to get up to speed (unless you drop a lot of extra cash on them anyway)

As someone who currently has 4 alts. It's because people enjoy playing different characters without resorting to fantasia addiction. There are gameplay reasons sure like getting past weekly tome cap for gearing alt jobs but most people I know have alts for rp

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 TheNight

Isn't it alarming that 6.4-6.45, which is probably one of the most feature-rich patches in EW, with IS update, new Variant/Criterion, a new raid series, and BLU only sees a decline in returners? Seems like this is the start of a new trend which will continue as we get to the REAL content drought in 6.5. Pray, look forward to it.

That's the thing, it's the last patch with interesting content.
The biggest players are done with it and since there's no Bozja, no content to farm, people just stop playing.
People don't see value in doing BLU or criterion, hopefully SQEX will figure why and fix it rather than giving up on it.

Also for instance, there's still more player in 6.41 that there was in 5.41.
So yes, the game does keep growing.

Those playerbase drops are normal for every MMO. I do not worry and i look forward to the huuuuuuge hype when the EW successor will be released.





Cheers

Originally Posted by Koros

you'll never get this chance again, ff14 had its shot and failed. sad

I know you are trolling but i will take your bait and see if i can contribute with some useful info if anyone is honestly interested.

TwitchTracker and any stream platform is a mean to analyze AUDIENCE (e.g: people that probably is not playing the game right now for multiple reasons).

We can say that is a indirect way to measure hype. Keep in mind that our community is weird and the same person may watch multiple streamers just to see reactions to a specific scene (me included).


World of Warcraft




ESO



Lost Ark



New World

IMHO, Guild Wars 2 is a better game than ESO in multiple aspects and is not generating the same hype. I would blame: marketing, lack of visual fidelity and introduction is childish for some races. Open World exploration and progress is great, but after a while is boring. GW2 has a loyal community and is way better than Lost Ark and New World in terms of stability. ESO positive aspects: the name Elder Scrolls (marketing), immersive quests and multiple choices. Negative: paywall everywhere and most expensive sub (premium) system available.

Talking about FFXIV, FFXIV has the potential to create hype and draw attention, the name (brand) is strong like Elder Scrolls or Warcraft and the audience plots (TwitchTracker) shows the same behavior as World of Warcraft - a game 19 years old. That's all we can say with our superficial data. Anything beyond this is a mere speculation. We can combine lodestone data and XIVCensus but only SE knows the truth.

Based on my daily experience, I see sprouts everywhere all the time and my queue times are lower than ShB days. We can't measure our retention. For now, i would say that any decline isn't a big surprise for Yoshida, he said it himself multiple times. However, as the hype/audience graphics are showing, it's a constant build up and decline. If Guild Wars 2 is active as a flatline in steam charts and survived for years before steam and even WoW still receive some attention after everything weird going on... i can't see a dark future for FFXIV. They need to make 3x the effort they did in ARR to ruin this game.

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?