Playing with Chinese?

[Obavijest]

I think this actually might be good for the rest of us....there would be more Chinese playing than the whole current playerbase multiplied by one hundred

[Lusavari]

That's completely untrue.... Sure, the Chinese have over a billion people, but they're not all gamers. Gaming is something only a small minority do. And it's not like every single one that does game is going to jump up and play FFXIV. At most, maybe 250,000-500,000 Chinese players are going to pick up, which would balance out to about 25% of the player base tops. China is not this big scary monster that's going to over run FFXIV.

I know there are tensions between Chinese and Japanese. The grad school I go to has a huge Chinese population (10% of the total student body). If you wear a shirt with Japanese characters on it, you will occasionally get some harsh looks. But overall my experience is my Chinese friends are pretty accepting of my Japanese friends. It could be because we're a little older than the average student though.

But considering this is a Japanese game, and the old jokes of GMs favoring Japanese players in XI, it's super unlikely that Chinese players, were they on the same servers, would last very long acting aggressively towards Japanese players.

[Antipika]

At most, maybe 250,000-500,000 Chinese players are going to pick up, which would balance out to about 25% of the player base tops.

>250K-500K
>25% of the playerbase

Yeah right, so the whole player base would be ~1M? Delusional.

[Lusavari]

Well, I don't see it getting to 5 million. How many people did FFXI have? 2 million?

[Antipika]

Well, I don't see it getting to 5 million. How many people did FFXI have? 2 million?

More like saying it will be way lower. XI had 500K. If XIV gets at this level already (and maintain it for couple of years), it would be amazing.

[Giit]

The Great fireWall of China strikes again.

some random info on MMO gaming in China:

http://mmohuts.com/editorials/chinese-mmorpgs

[Elexia]

More like saying it will be way lower. XI had 500K. If XIV gets at this level already (and maintain it for couple of years), it would be amazing.

No, XI had 750k+ people with 2 million+ characters at peak, it evened out to 500k for numerous years then started to drop off and evened out to 250-400k in recent years, now it's probably lower than that but the baseline for XI was 500k while it topped off 750k+, 500k was always the number thrown around because it was people's estimates before SE started releasing census data.

XIV had 650k at the start then dropped of significantly, that's why I'm saying it'll be amazing if it gets even half as successful as XI did if people count subs as success, and being supported in china will have quite the jump in sub numbers.

[Antipika]

[1]Citations needed.

(Also don't care about the number of characters, we're talking active subscriptions. Find me a census where SE announced 750K.)

[Mirage]

SE announced that they reached 2 million active characters a few years ago, for the first time in the game's history. A closed account with 5 characters would not count towards the amount of active characters (because they are inactive, not active), so this is not a completely irrelevant figure to work with.

Now of course, a character isn't a subscription, but how many characters do you really think the average player is paying for? I seriously doubt the average player has more than 5 characters. Of course, some have way more, in the form of crafting mules, AH mules, storage mules etc, but realistically, I doubt that's enough to push the average up to more than 5.

If we use 7.5 as a very rough estimate, (and most likely an exaggeration) for now, 2 million active characters means 266k subscribers. If we use an average of 5 characters per account (which I think is much more likely), we end up at 400k subscribers.

Who knows how much the population has decreased since 2009? I don't know. I would be surprised if it has decreased significantly, though. They added a lot of new stuff after 2009.

Source:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics...opics_all.html
Third entry from the top.

-edit-
For some more data, the 2009 census (picked this year because that's where the 2M active character count is from), 28.84% of characters were between level 41 and 75. Characters above lv 40 are unlikely to be mules, these are usually left at level 1-10.

This makes it probable that at the time the game reached 2 million active characters, ~29% or more of them were not crafting/AH/storage mules, which makes it plausible that the number of active accounts could have been around 500k at the time.

If you want to interpret the census statistics yourself, you'll find them here. I might not have interpreted everything perfectly, but I'm not trying to purposely skew the information that is available.

-edit again-
These statistics do not give us any information about how many players have multiple high level characters on one account. Dualboxing isn't unheard of, but this can't be done with characters on the same account, therefore the most common application of several high level characters on one account is when you would want to play on several servers. This is entirely guesswork, but I don't think this was a very common practice. Maybe it would be a fair assumption to estimate about 100k characters as being a high level alt on a different server.

[Hyrist]

Exactly. I think SE should ask them if there asian and female or male to. if there female, and asian they automatically get put on my server XD.

I have a feeling 'server' wasn't your first choice of words there.