The forums are flawed as the main way to collect player feedback.

[Talael]

Not only do the forums favor one specific region of players over the rest of the world, but it is also full of bad faith criticism. I imagine it's hard for them to find the good feedback here when many posts are completely ridiculous and say stuff like "Yoshi P hates us, (content) literally ruined my life, ded game" (this is barely an exaggeration).

Yoshi-P has a well known quote from a presentation where he states that "A complaint is worth twice a compliment. The silent always leave first. If they complain they still care". For the most part I agree with this sentiment but I think it has a big flaw in its logic. There are also people who are silent because they are happy with things and didn't feel the need to make a forum account to complain. I think their flawed method of collecting feedback shows in changes like the mount tilt system. A small minority of players didn't like it so they nerfed it to the displeasure to the majority of players who did like that feature. Now you have people complaining on the forums to revert the change but getting these devs to backpedal on a change is much harder.

What they should do is implement some form of player survey, either in-game or in emails to improve their data collection by seeking out the average player rather than having skewed data from the forums. If they had this feature they might've seen that like 85% of players liked the mount tilt as is and could've instead made it a toggle between off or the current intensity. But what instead happened was that they saw a few dozen people on the forums say they hated the tilt and extrapolated that it must be some widespread problem they need to address, and these are the ones who cared to "speak up" for the silent majority who were too apathetic to voice their complaints. They give a small reward for occasionally questions like a token for some minions or something idk. Make feedback represent the actual playerbase better!

For the first time since 1.0, the gamers reviews are trash. Just because you think the majority loves this horrible expansion, it doesnt make its true. Census shows theres just 600.000 players and all players review anywhere are negative. Foruns posts are super negative also, more so than normal. What can you possible have to show all this proof isnt right? Game is in a terrible state and YoshiP should be working to solve that.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

For the first time since 1.0, the gamers reviews are trash. Just because you think the majority loves this horrible expansion, it doesnt make its true. Census shows theres just 600.000 players and all players review anywhere are negative. Foruns posts are super negative also, more so than normal. What can you possible have to show all this proof isnt right? Game is in a terrible state and YoshiP should be working to solve that.

You completely misunderstood my post if you think that I was trying to make a “the game is great! Only the negative people post here!” point. I think the game needs improvement and good feedback needs better ways to reach the devs because here it is frowned out by bad faith exaggerated criticism like this. You’re literally doing the meme

[DPZ2]

Census shows theres just 600.000 players

I'm not sure which "census" you are referring to. Please let us know.

MMO Populations is loosely based on Social Media references, which is why it references a bit more than 200,000 active players.

Steam Charts lists an average of about 18,000 daily players via Steam over the last 30 days. Since there are non-Steam accounts on PC, PS5 and XBox, this doesn't track extremely well other than to suggest the number of daily players is pretty much the same as it was a year ago during the November timeframe. It's a mixed bag.

*
FFXIV Census [ https://ffxivcensus.com/ ] hasn't been updated since just before 7.0 release, at which time there were 1.4 million players recorded. Note this number was derived from the same sources as the Lucky Bancho census.

Lucky Bancho has a popular population census (latest was released on 4 November). It is gleaned directly from Lodestone entries and has certain "requirements" to be counted as an active player (listed below).

From a machine translation of this page [ https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archiv...1096.html#more ]:

The criteria for determining the active character that is the base of the 1.15 million active characters and 950,000 golden characters are as follows.

The maximum level is 70 or more (not including 70 just) OR Jobs that cannot be released in the free trial OR FC affiliation*

HP, level, and experience have fluctuated since the last survey (8/27).

Since the last survey, the number of minions and mounts you have has changed.

New characters that were not present in the previous survey

Characters with Lodestone profiles, minions, and mounts in full

Possession of at least one mount

Excludes characters who use jumping potions (IL390 with a maximum level of 70 when collecting data, IL530 with a maximum level of 80, IL660 with a maximum level of 90) in the job when retrieving data.