Discuss : is ffxiv in trouble

[Gordita]

2) "To let you install new outfits from third-party sources" LOL ok

What a great performance that was btw, too bad most people can't hear your tone of voice via text on a forum.

[Colt47]

The weak points FFXIV has are mostly with side content and repetitious content needed to grind out levels of other jobs, as well as the hardest content. So the core of the game is good, but that core only lasts so long and then people are stuck with the dregs.

The dregs of FFXIV are...

1) Savage
2) Hunts
4) Relic
5) Crafting and Gathering

The core of FFXIV is the same as any RPG: You fight things, go up in level, find ways to get money to buy better gear or just get better gear from dungeons, until someone completes the story or whatever it is for the current patch and expansion. Then there are the 8 man and 24 man raids, trials, etc that are around at end game to keep people busy (This includes EX).

The dregs are basically the vestigial content that gets bolted onto the main set of content that only some subset of the community gets involved with, or ends up being monopolized by a specific group of people. Since they aren't really considered core to the game they get released and then people are told to go have at it.

1) The Hunts Problem -> The hunts are an example of overworld content that gets monopolized. Effectively, people grouped together to form hunt trains to take down the hunts efficiently due to the increase in HP pool, which sounds great except that so many people end up going on these hunt trains thanks to DC travel, people can't even zone into the areas right away. Not to mention if someone is on a console they are at a disadvantage here because the load times are longer for them. Hunts can die in as little as 15 seconds after engagement, and that is the current hunts. Older hunts can die so quick on some nights that there has to be a wait period of about 5-10 seconds before pull, or too many people would just miss out.

2) Crafting and Gathering -> This is one of those things where its not really fun to do it, but you do it anyway because its needed for unlocking certain beast tribes, melding materia, and repairing your own gear. The system for crafting was supposed to make it interesting, but like all repetitive tasks that you end up having to do a lot of, the extra steps just make it tedious. People invented macros for crafting for a reason.

3) Savage -> The problem with savage is mostly they can never be consistent in designing the content and setting difficulty with it. That and the fact the fights get designed for specifically a set of roles means if you are playing the popular job, you're going to have a hell of a time trying to do savage as you compete with all the other Jims and Johns playing that same popular class. Meanwhile, the guy who decided to grit his teeth and play something repetitive and old has no trouble finding groups even if he is mediocre (Or you played a healer this expansion and survived the apocalypse known as Abyssos Tier)

4) Relic -> Its one of those things that either gets tied to something that is too repetitive, or comes in after the glory is over with the content it is attached to and then people feel the same burn as if it was attached to something repetitive. At least in Endwalker we just run around shooting hunts all day... unless you never did the Manderville quests. In that case, strap your butt in because you got some questing to do that will take you a good while.

[GoatOfWar]

I disagree on population, I think the game is going to grow more with Dawntrail at least.

The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

[Heroman3003]

The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

Does it need to? The late ShB/early EW boost was massive, but you don't need massive boost every time to maintain stable growth. There won't be huge explosion in new players, that I'm sure, but there will be enough coming that the overall is still a net positive and that's enough.

[strawberrycake]

The game doesn't have a WoW exodus, pandemic, 10 year of story telling coming to a climax and streamer hype to piggyback off of this time.

Yep, also, a lot of the people who came here from WoW hyped it up as something it couldn't be and wasn't. And for the ones who stayed, a lot, if not most of them are burn outs from WoW that no ones there wanted to deal with anyways.

Does it need to? The late ShB/early EW boost was massive, but you don't need massive boost every time to maintain stable growth. There won't be huge explosion in new players, that I'm sure, but there will be enough coming that the overall is still a net positive and that's enough.

All of ShB was Covid and WoW exodus hype, and Early EW was the last of that hype dying out when all of those people couldn't clear past tier 2 of pandemonium.

Stormblood, an arguably better game then WoW at the point in time and a better XIV expansion had a longer retention rate.

[Gordita]

Stormblood days were truly peak xiv times. The community was so much better back then.

[Striker44]

Is FFXIV in trouble?

In a word - no.

In three words - not even close.

In three other words - quite the opposite.

Don't let the forums fool you. We represent only the smallest grain of sand compared to the playerbase, and people who take the time to visit the forums, make an account, and post here are far and away not representative of the typical player.

If you look over the history of FFXIV, each successive expansion has shown a steady rise in the size of the active playing population, and EW has continued that trend. There was an anomalous spike with the famous "WoW exodus," but if you remove that one-time gigantic explosion of people and subsequent fall-off (as most came to realize FFXIV and WoW are designed with two different audiences in mind), you'll see the same steady trend still ultimately occurred. At every comparable data point along the way (e.g. just before patch x.2, the first month of x.5, etc.), EW has had the highest active playerbase to date, surpassing ShB (which itself had been the highest up to that point).

Heck, with the latest patch, Aether hunt trains went back to announcing some of them only server-wide instead of DC-wide because they were getting too large. I can still queue for practically anything on tank or healer, including random dungeons or raids I haven't done in a while for WT, and get it to pop within a few minutes.

Will the typical formula that SE has had enormous success with eventually become stale? Yeah. It already has for some people, as evidenced by the forum here. But there's still such a reliable influx of new (and returning) players that it more than makes up for that. At some point down the road, the steady rise FFXIV is still experiencing will eventually reach a peak and then start declining. It's possible we're still going up. It's possible EW represents the peak. But we're certainly not on the decline yet, and even once that starts, the population will remain healthy for a considerable period of time even if the dev team did nothing to change course.

So no, FFXIV isn't in trouble. In fact - it's the complete opposite. It's thriving, and either at its peak or still climbing towards it.

[strawberrycake]

All of this

While XIV certainly isn't failing, the problem with this mind set that it's better heard then read, I agree with a lot of this, but, the balance is still an issue that can come rearing it's ugly head once we're in DT. With the plan to rework all the jobs as Yoshida said, this can cause a massive rift, this expansion is lack luster in many ways and while I don't want it to be the case, EW wasn't the best expansion. The Question now is, can XIV stand up to having a truly bad expansion, every MMO eventually has one and will people have the same faith and ability to ride it out when it happens.

In every MMO historically, people are really quick to say it's fine in the moment until you have to actually be in the trenches calling out Devs and making a companies higher ups pay more attention to how an IP is being managed. No company is immune this this.

[Supersnow845]

One thing unique to EW is it’s uniquely awful retention rate, all expansions see a drop off in their later patches, especially the lull between x.5 and x+1.0 but usually that dip is in the realm of 10-20%, according to the recent census data even though the WOW exodus affected the 6.0 launch 14 has lost close to 70% of its 6.0 playerbase numbers

That is not a healthy drop no matter how high they were coming down off

[Heroman3003]

snip

I mean, it already had 'bad' expansions. For gameplay, it was HW and its raiding situation, for story it was StB, seen as 'the low'. The real question remains on whether DT will be bad or good. Frankly, so far, it seems to be setting up to be another reiteration of ShB formula, just like EW was, but this time with everything that wasn't there being brought back. It will have field zone, unlike EW, it will introduce new limited job, it will introduce a rework to Deep Dungeons (basically new content as a result), it will have all the other normal things expected of expansion content. Frankly, content-wise, DT is setting up to be the richest expansion yet so far, potentially better than StB was.