[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[VoidsentStatus]

You mean the spike in player count that is already falling off ? (just like every expansion btw, this is nothing new)

https://steamcharts.com/app/39210

It wont take 4-6 months for players to drop off the game, this was a new expansion, people will leave just like they always do, a lot of the players in 14 are MSQ enjoyers which is fine, but they only come back for major patches for the story and that's it, then there are people who lost interest etc etc.

This "massive" spike aint the massive spike you make it sound like it is

1) Most people don't even play on Steam on PC because of issues when it comes to payment, steam side issues, limited sale opportunities including pre-sales for expansion bonuses apparently, and extra launching hassle.

2) You're looking at 5-40/50k players on average from Steam in a game that has millions of players. Even the lowest estimates of active players is normally 500k+, with some estimates and census data showing it breaking a mil+. They literally shared at the 10 year anniversary, that they had reached over 30mil registered accounts.

3) Dawntrail has had better PvE (non-MSQ content than EW). The content planned for DT is also going to be a lot more long term engagement than EW was. A field operation and cosmic exploration are going to be more active than island sanctuary.

4) As the playerbase grows, which it always has done regardless of whether an expansion was labeled as good or bad, and the hardware stays the same, it is going to grow more congested. If it was congested in EW, it is going to be congested in DT.

5) These numbers mean absolutely nothing because during the entirety of the lowest points of EW, they still classified worlds and entire data centers as congested still. EW was considered dead as hell and they were purposely changing things in DT to keep people playing, which means it is not reasonable to even remotely assume Dawntrail is going to dive harder than EW and break not only dev intention with putting in more content and rewards, but also breaking the MMO pattern that ff14 has followed for a decade.

6) Xbox being added and having a growing population is also not included as a difference between Endwalker and Dawntrail in terms of congestion status.

7) PC has different playing habits and playtime than anyone on console. PC players are able to brute force skip cutscenes, they have various plugins that reduce manual work on mb use, setting prices, etc., they have botted crafting & gathering, botted island sanctuary, botted golden saucer related activities, various 3rd party plugins that affect performance inside of raiding that changes clear speed and probability, often bigger storage on their device allowing for switching to other games more commonly than someone on console who has to pick what their primary games are since we're not going to be installing and uninstalling games frequently, faster loading times into content, leaving content, and travelling zones, console doesn't dip in population anytime 3rd party plugins go down for updates/patches, and more console players joined the game for game itself and not for modding purposes like a giant chunk of the gpose and rp community.