FFXIV population decline continues

[Basteala]

Honestly the best indicator as to when people should start worrying is if and when auto demo triggers en masse.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Honestly the best indicator as to when people should start worrying is if and when auto demo triggers en masse.

Is it still paused today? I didn’t keep up on this front.

[CamuiKushi]

I don't think it's THAT surprising folks started the game and dropped off during Endwalker. I think a lot of old-school FF fans had heard the game actually got a good story that was "ending" and thought "oh, I can experience the whole thing now" and treated it like a single-time experience.

[SWATomega]

So I'll give my two gil what i think is happening. I think our expectations were too high or they were dashed be dawntrail. Reasoning is what we just came from, we just had the original story conclude many if not all plot lines were tied up. We were expecting to have the next expansion to be just like Shadow Bringers and Endwalker. The problem is how to follow up with content that was just as good as those two expansions when a new 10-year story is to begin. We came from characters we liked, WE were front and center to all that was happening, and we went from moment to moment, action to action.

Then we play the DT MSQ and we get characters that people don't like, where our character is in the background, and things are slow-moving. It is a jarring mental change; we wanted more but to start a new thing had to slow down story-wise.

I even kinda expected Dawntrail would be a rough patch for us, realistically how were they supposed to make DT truly equal or even out due ShB or EW. We come this super high in our character and other character development, we beat the bad guy, stop the man behind the curtain, and then save another world. Then we went to, you're a supporting character until the very end, it is a hard shift.

I do see the doom and gloom that FFXIV is dead, won't recover, yada yada yada. I think the player base will be okay, we are in a rough patch for FFXIV but I truly believe we will be fine. DT isn't done yet we still have 7.2 - 7.5 left, and we still have additional activities left, plus other stuff. I know that people hate the patch cycle on how slow it is or how spaced it is, but honestly nothing we can do there that is all the dev team.

This is what i think, i could be right or wrong on this. I love the game, the population will go up and down depending on a bunch of stuff but we'll be fine overall. I just want to UNGA BUNGA MORE and want Hrothgal armor for shoulders and long gloves to be fixed.

[Jeeqbit]

We were expecting to have the next expansion to be just like Shadow Bringers and Endwalker.

I don't think most people were expecting that, to be fair.

I do see the doom and gloom that FFXIV is dead, won't recover, yada yada yada. I think the player base will be okay

I don't think it will be okay. I know it will be okay. People return eventually when something good happens.

As for the game itself... still see hundreds of parties for High-End content and lots and lots of people progging chaotic. It feels like it's booming if you join parties for that. On Dynamis I've met lots of sprouts in mentor roulette, and found full Ocean Fishing parties. I'm not seeing practical evidence of this "decline" reflected in the game.

But also, worst case scenario, if the population became a quarter of what it has been, it would just be like Heavensward and Stormblood which were fine.

[Velthice]

I don't give a single frick about the msq. You do that content once and then it's over. The problem is that unless you're interested in raiding or similarly higher end content, there's absolutely nothing worth doing, and that SE seems like they're completely fine with that cadence.

Can you imagine if there were no savage/ultimate content until 7.2/7.3? You wouldn't hear the end of the of it. So why is that reality ok for casual content? Of course having an endgame is important, but in an mmo as large as xiv you have to take into account and cater to a variety of players, you can't just keep making content for one specific group. I think a perfect example of xiv getting this right was ARR relics. It was something you could work on as soon as you finished the msq, was regularly updated, and at various points the relic weapon was useful as a baseline to get into the current raid tier. It was basically the bare minimum expected of you to start the first coil, and it wasn't uncommon to see people with animus and novus relics taking on second coil

At some point, SE seems to have decided that having a meaningful casual progression path (or at this point, having casual content at all within the first year of an expansion) was something that they were no longer interested in doing and now choose frontload their expansions with raiding content and make it the end all be all of progressing your character until a year in where SE decides that they can find the time to address the rest (and the majority of, mind) of their playerbase and grace them with gift of whatever content they can be bothered to pull out of their arse

All the promises of content in dawntrail mean NOTHING if it isn't implemented in a timely manner. If we have to wait half an expansions lifespan for field operations, exploration dungeons or whatever else, that is completely unacceptable. SE's priorities NEED to change. My greatest fear is that after two expansions of people begging for SE to give them something to do outside of raiding, SE finally delivers in 7.2 or 7.3 and people get it and go like "Look! Look! the content is here! SE listened to us! The game is good! I told you it would be!" and then SE sees that reaction and goes "we did a good job" and learns nothing. Then 8.0 comes around and the cycle repeats again with SE self assured that they can just have nothing for their playerbase to do for an entire year and it's completely fine for them to do so. Sadly, and I really do mean it makes me fricken sad, I see this as the most likely outcome

[Lilapop]

I don't give a single frick about the msq. You do that content once and then it's over. The problem is that unless you're interested in raiding or similarly higher end content, there's absolutely nothing worth doing, and that SE seems like they're completely fine with that cadence.

Can you imagine if there were no savage/ultimate content until 7.2/7.3? You wouldn't hear the end of the of it. So why is that reality ok for casual content? Of course having an endgame is important, but in an mmo as large as xiv you have to take into account and cater to a variety of players, you can't just keep making content for one specific group. I think a perfect example of xiv getting this right was ARR relics. It was something you could work on as soon as you finished the msq, was regularly updated, and at various points the relic weapon was useful as a baseline to get into the current raid tier. It was basically the bare minimum expected of you to start the first coil, and it wasn't uncommon to see people with animus and novus relics taking on second coil

At some point, SE seems to have decided that having a meaningful casual progression path (or at this point, having casual content at all within the first year of an expansion) was something that they were no longer interested in doing and now choose frontload their expansions with raiding content and make it the end all be all of progressing your character until a year in where SE decides that they can find the time to address the rest (and the majority of, mind) of their playerbase and grace them with gift of whatever content they can be bothered to pull out of their arse

All the promises of content in dawntrail mean NOTHING if it isn't implemented in a timely manner. If we have to wait half an expansions lifespan for field operations, exploration dungeons or whatever else, that is completely unacceptable. SE's priorities NEED to change. My greatest fear is that after two expansions of people begging for SE to give them something to do outside of raiding, SE finally delivers in 7.2 or 7.3 and people get it and go like "Look! Look! the content is here! SE listened to us! The game is good! I told you it would be!" and then SE sees that reaction and goes "we did a good job" and learns nothing. Then 8.0 comes around and the cycle repeats again with SE self assured that they can just have nothing for their playerbase to do for an entire year and it's completely fine for them to do so. Sadly, and I really do mean it makes me fricken sad, I see this as the most likely outcome

Don't forget, there's still more endgame content to come, more Savage tiers, wouldn't put it by them for another Extreme or two either, and a Savage raid tacked on to the exploration zone.

[NamiRocket]

Don't forget, there's still more endgame content to come, more Savage tiers, wouldn't put it by them for another Extreme or two either, and a Savage raid tacked on to the exploration zone.

Continually Missing The Point (Savage)

[iiOmarSP]

Pretty much mainly cause the transition from Endwalker to Dawntrail showcased this game's fantastic system of not having anything to hold people's attention until the X.2 patch (which Endwalker had done absolutely nothing about), now that the 10 year old story is done.

You can attribute this to the fact that lots of people don't like the story itself and the new set of characters, which based on what I've seen off of social media: a decent number stopped playing due to it.
You can attribute this to the fact that when an expansion comes out, there is virtually *NOTHING* to do outside of mount farming for older expansion if you are somewhat fresh, current expansion mount farming, Savage, Unreal, the now new raiding content: Chaotic and an ultimate.
I.E the only type of content this game will have for the ENTIRE YEAR of its expansion's launch.
For the people who DON'T do raiding in general, they find this type of content super unappealing to them, as not everyone wants to do raiding, and thus: this type of content is practically useless for them.
For the casual side of things, what exactly do you have outside of the story? 2 post story dungeons, maps, fishing if you are into that sort of thing, or just crafting.
The same things we all had since this formulaic expansion content drop is being done since, arguably: Stormblood.
For so long, people have talked about how dumped down jobs have become, and at this point I think people just gave up and moved on as clearly nothing was done about it.

When the one thing your game is being touted as fantastic suddenly ends up pissing off over half of the playerbase and you can't pinpoint which is which, this is the only outcome that will happen.

If they want to keep people around, you can't just keep doing the same thing over and over and expect people to stick around, or have some complacency and just get lazy.

Most people have constantly praised this game for its story telling for *y e a r s*, and what happens when we get a second expansion where the story is a controversial part of it when it is fresh? people simply leave for a while to possibly the next expansion, no questions asked.

[iiOmarSP]

Amusingly, I bought all of the Pixel Remasters last year for a Steam summer sale but have yet to touch any of them because I was too distracted by FF14. Given how things have played out since then though... one wonders if I made a bad call here and would have been better served cancelling my sub at the time.

Id say go give em a go in the meantime: 4 is a pretty good start, and 3 is possibly the best PR release imo.