A new tactic for the dissatisfied

[Jojoya]

As for the actual claim, who cares about other games, this is about FFXIV and what you implied is exactly what I mentioned earlier, there is no misunderstanding to it, your point made absolutely 0 sense and now you are trying to talk to me about "my negativity" and literally going on about other topics because you know what you said made absolutely no sense.

Because greater access to games will change what players choose to play and how often.

That shouldn't be difficult to figure out.

We can sit here and argue this out for the next decade but short of SE releasing active player counts by platform, neither side of the discussion has proof of anything other than the number of players logging into FFXIV through Steam has changed since Endwalker released.

I've pointed out reasons why I believe those numbers may not be an accurate sampling compared to the actual numbers for this game. The changes in the Lucky Bancho active character census numbers likewise don't agree with the Steam numbers.

You don't have any proof that those who don't log into FFXIV via Steam have the same gaming habits as those who do anymore than I have proof that they don't. Neither side has proof of anything here other than fewer players are logging to FFXIV via Steam now than when Endwalker launched.

You can sit there screaming "the sky is falling!" as much as you want but it's not going to change anything. SE has far more accurate data on the numbers than any player will ever have. They're going to know what the turnover has been, and how it compared to prior expansions. They're going to know what demographic is having the biggest impact on those numbers based on what content is seeing a larger drop in participation compared to the drops that occurred in previous expansions. They will react to anything out of the ordinary in whatever fashion makes the best business sense to them, which may mean they do nothing at all.

Just for the heck of it, I went to Steam to check the user reviews for Endwalker. If so many users of the Steam client have stopped playing because they feel the expansion is bad, I was expecting to see a fairly large number of negative reviews showing up in their graphs over the last few months.



We see the review bombing from the expansion start due to the log in queues then the negative reviews swiftly disappear.

Out of the last 100 reviews submitted to Steam (reaching back to December of last year), 77 are positive.

Of the 23 negative, it's a mix of reasons with the largest percentage complaining about trying to purchase the game and play for the first time followed by some of the same issues that have been brought up in the forums. Then there are the random Not Recommended reviews with comments that include "still waiting on the sex update" and "ass" (seriously, feel free to see for yourself).

If we look at the numbers going all that back to launch, there are 1317 reviews with 205 of them Not Recommended (again, mostly the review bombs because of the login problems).

Considering the discussions we've had here in recent weeks about how people usually only leave feedback when they're unhappy, doesn't it seem strange that 84% of reviews are positive during a period when the game has allegedly lost 70% of its players because the game sucks?

Or could it be that the drop isn't because players are unhappy but because most of them are just following normal MMORPG patterns and taking a break to play some of the other high profile titles that have been released in recent months?

We can't know short of tracking every single one of those players down and getting them to tell us why they are not currently playing.

Anyway, there's some proof that the number of players unhappy with the game aren't as high as some claim, coming from the same source that is supposedly showing players are unhappy and quitting. We're all free to interpret however we want. It still makes no difference.

SE is going to do what they want with the game.