After Dawntrails abject Failure of a Story, there need to be serious Consequences

[Kazemon15]

This community has absolutely 0 standards and it shows lmao

Restricted DC travel for absolutely no reasons at all aside from week 1, absolutely terrible story with a million plotholes and a lot of drama regarding all the people in it, an absolutely mediocre graphical update that made a lot of people upset, and also changed the world for the worst, a good example is sea of clouds at sunset pre-DT and after DT, 4-5 times a month constant DDOS with absolutely end to it in sight, lengthened content drought among other things.

Meanwhile this community :

Wow great job guys dawntrail is amazing woooooo!

For the love of anything holy please any kind of standards for once, the amount of things you people tolerate and accept is wild, and yall are the reason why this game is barely growing at all or just being barely stable in population.

The day this game ever goes down the drain a few years from now, yall will only have yourselves to blame.

Not 0 standards, just different than yours who want to be whiny and nitpick about everything you don't like and throw a tantrum when others don't agree.

There are some things in the game I don't like, but giving constructive criticism in a respectful way is the way to do it. Not post that go "OMG STORY SO BAD, EVERYONE SHOULD BE FIRED!!!! WE DEMAND COMPENSATION, I FEEL PERSONALLY HURT BY YOSHI P" Yeah that isn't gonna fly or let people take you seriously.

WoW and Guild Wars are still going strong, despite not being as "big" now. WoW went to hell years ago yet is still continuing on. It's dev team are sexual harassers, but no, Yoshi P's team is the worst because they put out a story you didn't like.... please grow up.

[honest_psycho]

... but giving constructive criticism in a respectful way is the way to do it.

I did give out respectful criticism at first, but then came all the enlightened poets who proclaimed that everyone hating the msq is jsut an illiterate cavemen and who are seeing depth and nuance when there isnt any.

I'm done being nice.
I'm done debating what has been debated for months now.

There is no question about the writing that has not been answered or identified as pure garbage.

I don't want 8.0 to turn out like this, I don't want FF14 to "go to hell" like WoW did.

[Kazemon15]

I did give out respectful criticism at first, but then came all the enlightened poets who proclaimed that everyone hating the msq is jsut an illiterate cavemen and who are seeing depth and nuance when there isnt any.

I'm done being nice.
I'm done debating what has been debated for months now.

There is no question about the writing that has not been answered or identified as pure garbage.

I don't want 8.0 to turn out like this, I don't want FF14 to "go to hell" like WoW did.

This:

It's been almost three months, there has been hundreds of threads, negative reviews andhours and hours of essays analysing every possible detail of Dawntrails writing and its myriad of problems.

And I think it's safe to say that the Story this time was an absolute abject failure that warrants serious consquences.

For a game that advertised itself as the "Story-MMO", the story this time around did some serious damage to the game's reputation.

Is not "respectful criticism". "I didn't like the story, so I think it's ruining their reputation and they have to have serious consequences". You are basically saying they should be fired because you didn't like the story. If you had started with "In my personal opinion, the story is lackluster, here are the reasons why", then yeah that is respectful criticism. But actively saying there need to be "consequences" for this? ....No.

[honest_psycho]

With "At first" I meant right after I finished the MSQ which was like a week after early-access.
Here is my very first criticism I wrote after finishing (July 4th):

The problem isn't that we got all that.

The problem is that Wuk Lamat is a textbook-case of "Mary Sue":

- Getting the majority of the screentime and dialog, making other characters severely underdeveloped (example: Zoraal Ja's goals and motivations are mentioned in like 10 lines in total) or Gabool Ja speedrunning his redemption arc in order to not steal WukLamats spotlight.

- getting plotarmor against Gabool Ja and half an army and taking him out, despite being fought off effortlessly before.

- No serious characterflaws (not likeing alpacas or being seasick doesnt count, or is even more embarassing, considering she's a 6'6 buff warrior, absolute cringe)

- She is never forced to do a morally grey decision, best example is with the red-armored HokYuj. Before they fight, some random fucking bird just attacks all of the sudden, so WukLamat can heroicly "save" her enemy and befriend them".
Imagine what kind of interessting dilemma she could have faced, if she had to kill in self defense, but her status as spotless hero is saved by coincidence, --> no character progession.

Textbook-case of "Mary Sue".

Is this "respectful" enough for you? I even put in a concrete example for you do defend if you're so inclined.

This:
If you had started with "In my personal opinion, the story is lackluster, here are the reasons why"

Learn to read, I already said there are hundrets of threads who already gave out the exact "respektful" criticism you demand.
I will not write another essay with my personal opinions because that's redundand at this point.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

This community has absolutely 0 standards and it shows lmao

Restricted DC travel for absolutely no reasons at all aside from week 1, absolutely terrible story with a million plotholes and a lot of drama regarding all the people in it, an absolutely mediocre graphical update that made a lot of people upset, and also changed the world for the worst, a good example is sea of clouds at sunset pre-DT and after DT, 4-5 times a month constant DDOS with absolutely end to it in sight, lengthened content drought among other things.

Meanwhile this community :

Wow great job guys dawntrail is amazing woooooo!

For the love of anything holy please any kind of standards for once, the amount of things you people tolerate and accept is wild, and yall are the reason why this game is barely growing at all or just being barely stable in population.

The day this game ever goes down the drain a few years from now, yall will only have yourselves to blame.

How's that "there will never be housing blacklist features" position going for you?

Oh no, the poor venues, how will they manage without all of the people already on aether. Maybe they should just move to dynamis where anyone can visit. Problem solved.

Would cut down on the advertising.

[TDawnstar]

When I heard that Yoshi-P would ALSO be the director of FF16, I was worried if the quality of FF14 would suffer for it, and unfortunately I was right to worry.
The lack of oversight this story had is obvious to everyone.

It's even worse, he oversees the whole CS3 now, basically. So even more games in addition to 14 and 16.

Don't waste Yoshi-P's time on side-rpojects that get "underperforming sales".

I am afraid that's another problem entirely: namely, that SE needs to stop negotiating idiotic exclusive deals with Fony and then go surprise pikachu because PS5 didn't sell nearly as enough as expected. And it's about to get worse with the PS5 Pro debacle.
Go on Steam right away, it will sell just fine (it is even in TOP 10 of Steam right now despite all of the idiocies above).

It is clear that the current writers don't have the skill or talent required for this game and need to be replaced or even outright fired.

Facts.

[Eyrilona]

Again, Steam is an extremely small portion of the playerbase. And I know, it is actually impossible to see the entire playerbase because only SE can see those numbers. We only have Yoshi P's statement that the game is still doing well. That is the closest we have. You cannot just focus on steam and ignore the rest of the playerbase and use that as the game is dying. That is a bad argument. I even forgot that most people use the PS5 too, 90ish% of the Japanese playerbase actually use PS5, then even had a liveletter and showed controller vs. Keyboard and mouse and the fact that most Japanese typically do not own a personal computer. There is also the new Xbox playerbase to consider as well. Steam does not account for them either. It is impossible for me or PassinLay to provide accurate statistics, so using that as an argument is invalid.

Yes, WoW did get bought out, but my main argument is it did not get shut down and is still going on. Which it is. Which is fact. And no way a "bad argument". If WoW, one of the most popular MMOs of all time can still continue on despite being bought out by other investors is proof in itself that a simple bad review or smaller playerbase for FFXIV is not making it in "danger of shutting down."

Very well, I can also work with statistics if you so insist.

According to the most recent article that really went into his in 2023, Final Fantasy XIV at the time had an estimated daily player count of 493,667, of which 20,014 on steam. That means that if you base yourself on the movement of the Steam numbers, we are availing ourselves of very close to 1:25 of the total population. One in every twenty-five players is part of the sample.

That is a larger sample size representation than we use for quality assurance in microchip production, automobile manufacture, polls for who is going to win the next US elections, or even nuclear safety.

So insist if you will that as far as you are concerned Steam users are too tiny a fraction of the population to treat them as a sample for trends, but you will en passant need to argue that as you are concerned almost every use of statistics underpinning our societies, science and industry means nothing.

[PassinLay]

Very well, I can also work with statistics if you so insist.

According to the most recent article that really went into his in 2023, Final Fantasy XIV at the time had an estimated daily player count of 493,667, of which 20,014 on steam. That means that if you base yourself on the movement of the Steam numbers, we are availing ourselves of very close to 1:25 of the total population. One in every twenty-five players is part of the sample.

That is a larger sample size representation than we use for quality assurance in microchip production, automobile manufacture, polls for who is going to win the next US elections, or even nuclear safety.

So insist if you will that as far as you are concerned Steam users are too tiny a fraction of the population to treat them as a sample for trends, but you will en passant need to argue that as you are concerned almost every use of statistics underpinning our societies, science and industry means nothing.

Said it a lot better than I would, thank you.

That person is so far in denial it's actually wild.

[Kazemon15]

Very well, I can also work with statistics if you so insist.

According to the most recent article that really went into his in 2023, Final Fantasy XIV at the time had an estimated daily player count of 493,667, of which 20,014 on steam. That means that if you base yourself on the movement of the Steam numbers, we are availing ourselves of very close to 1:25 of the total population. One in every twenty-five players is part of the sample.

That is a larger sample size representation than we use for quality assurance in microchip production, automobile manufacture, polls for who is going to win the next US elections, or even nuclear safety.

So insist if you will that as far as you are concerned Steam users are too tiny a fraction of the population to treat them as a sample for trends, but you will en passant need to argue that as you are concerned almost every use of statistics underpinning our societies, science and industry means nothing.

Okay, thank you for the numbers. Would you mind linking the article? Because sometimes, articles still do not have the big picture, I would like to verify its source and what website it came from. And I would argue that in 2023, yes the playerbase was at a low, but that always happens. Post-MSQ, in-between patches are going to be at an all-time low where people are going to play other things while waiting for the next patch. It has been a thing since 2015, when HW first came out. The numbers are going to fluctuate.

According to the statistics they linked btw (https://steamcharts.com/app/39210), peak being around 94k on steam, and taking the almost 500k into account, then yeah, roughly 20% of the playerbase, as I said. So, I'm not sure I get this but, why is it okay to based statistics on 20% of the population? Please make me understand why ignoring 80% of the playerbase/population is a good statistic for things? And if that is how other companies do so as well, basing it on 20%, then yes, I will say that. Because it's largely ignoring the majority and should be looked at.

[Eyrilona]

Okay, thank you for the numbers. Would you mind linking the article? Because sometimes, articles still do not have the big picture, I would like to verify its source and what website it came from.

<snip>

According to the statistics they linked btw (https://steamcharts.com/app/39210), peak being around 94k on steam, and taking the almost 500k into account, then yeah, roughly 20% of the playerbase, as I said. So, I'm not sure I get this but, why is it okay to based statistics on 20% of the population? Please make me understand why ignoring 80% of the playerbase/population is a good statistic for things? And if that is how other companies do so as well, basing it on 20%, then yes, I will say that. Because it's largely ignoring the majority and should be looked at.

Naturally. These were the sources: daily player numbers were sourced from numbers tracked by https://mmo-population.com/r/ffxiv and Steam's public information respectively, and put side by side in this article by Dexerto https://www.dexerto.com/final-fantas...-2023-2112769/

As for your second question.. I am concerned you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how statistics work and what they are. Mathematically sound, probability based methods for approximating things for a large population based on a small representative sample of that population is exactly what statistics is. If you have a sample size that is 20% of the total population, you are not ignoring the other 80%, the other 80% are represented by the 20% that you do sample. If you are not happy until you are sample size is 100% of your population size.. you are not even doing statistics anymore, that is just a head count.

For example, the FDA approved 55 new medicines in 2023. Each of those medicines comes with whole sheets of numbers, like, "The chance of this or that side effect is 4%". Did you personally take each of those 55 medications, for their intended treatment duration? No? Then you must not have been in the tested sample. In fact, out of over 8 billion people on this planet, over 8 billion people were not part of the test group. Only a few hundred or thousand were. Did the FDA do an incredibly shoddy job ignoring over 99.9% of the population? No, the whole point is that by testing on a smaller volunteer group roughly representative of the general population, you already get a pretty good indication of what the stochastic probabilities are. You don't need to involve the entire planet's population in the test just to know that something is going to happen in around 4% of cases.

But please consult an impartial source for that as well - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics and https://www.fda.gov/media/175253/download?attachment