FFXIV population decline continues

[RaideDuku]

For folks that claim they "love the game and are concerned about it's direction", seems to me that they're REALLY OBSESSED about it ending. Just enjoy the game if you enjoy it and don't sweat the sub numbers. Less people playing does not invalidate your enjoyment, and if it dies, it dies, and at least the game provided you with good memories while it lasted. There will be, and are, other games.

And if you don't enjoy the game, and just get some sort of cathartic pleasure of watching every single subscription the count lowers, cackling madly like some hag that just had some long term curse that they laid on some person that mildly wronged them has come to fruition, your righteous anger finally made manifest... ... ...ok.

[BigCheez]

For folks that claim they "love the game and are concerned about it's direction", seems to me that they're REALLY OBSESSED about it ending. Just enjoy the game if you enjoy it and don't sweat the sub numbers. Less people playing does not invalidate your enjoyment, and if it dies, it dies, and at least the game provided you with good memories while it lasted. There will be, and are, other games.

And if you don't enjoy the game, and just get some sort of cathartic pleasure of watching pleasure of every single subscription the count lowers, cackling madly like some hag that just had some long term curse that they laid on some person that mildly wronged them has come to fruition, your righteous anger finally made manifest... ... ...ok.

No one wants the game to die. I think a lot of people just feel vindicated in their dissatisfaction with the state of the game being echoed and are glad that the developers are receiving a clear message that change is needed.

[Vintersol]

I think a lot of people just feel vindicated in their dissatisfaction with the state of the game being echoed and are glad that the developers are receiving a clear message that change is needed.

What are the changes that are needed?

[BigCheez]

What are the changes that are needed?

Primarily, the game needs more repeatable casual content in the first year of an expansion cycle. There's a decent amount of raid content but there's very little to do once you're done with it, and if you don't raid then there's literally no value in subscribing between x.0 and x.3.

Aside from FRU and CoD, 7.1 was just a couple of one time quests and then logging in for 5 minutes per day to do your beast tribe for 2 weeks, then 30 seconds per week to do the custom delivery for a few weeks.

The exploration zone and relics need to start by x.1 at the latest and I think the game could also do with another source of repeatable content with good rewards. Treasure maps are good but they've been reusing the same 2 doors and roulette wheel formulas for years and I think most people are pretty bored of them. We could really do with some new treasure map instances. I think variant/criterion dungeons had a lot of potential but needed more time to cook. If they added more rewards to the variant version and gave people an incentive to run them a few times per week, and also made the parts between bosses less tedious, I think those would be good too.

[Velthice]

And if you don't enjoy the game, and just get some sort of cathartic pleasure of watching pleasure of every single subscription the count lowers, cackling madly like some hag that just had some long term curse that they laid on some person that mildly wronged them has come to fruition, your righteous anger finally made manifest... ... ...ok.

Why you gotta call me out so specifically?

[MicahZerrshia]

This makes me curious how long Final Fantasy 11 was around before the "Great Trust Change" that turned it into the game it currently is due to low population, and if we're approaching the point where the same will happen to Final Fantasy 14 now.

Well, when it comes to FFXI, it was a completely different situation.

When FFXIV was about to release they dropped Abyssea on us, which upped the level cap, allowed us to level stupid fast, burn through content and gear up extremely easily, while at the same time rendering all old content and gear obsolete. They were essentially trying to rush us through the game, expecting us to just naturally transfer over to FFXIV. Then 1.0 happened (because as a tester I can attest that they completely ignored all of our feedback. For isntance, no one thought the 1.0 fatigue system was even remotely a good idea) and they scrambled to keep FFXI going to help keep the lights on while they were fixing XIV. But, they had already devestated the game and lost a large chunck of the playerbase due to a decade of work and dedication being gone in a literally instant, so they had to scramble which is what brought about trusts and such. They even gave us a new, and frankly amazing, expansion in Seekers of Adoulin that not only helped retain players but brough ppl who had left, back. Expansions in FFXI don't take nearly the work that FFXIV expacs do, and they had a dedicated team led by someone that cared for the world a lot and listened to their audience, so it wasn't hard for them to do.

So, the situation would not be the same unless they have another, yet unannounced, mmo on the burner waiting to be revealed. Even then though at least we knew about XIV when Abyssea fell on our heads like Dalamud would do to Eorzea just a couple short years later. What we are seeing now is purely just inexperienced, and likely overworked devs who are just trying to do something, while being led by someone who has lost his passion and feels he knows better than his audience.

[Jeeqbit]

This makes me curious how long Final Fantasy 11 was around before the "Great Trust Change" that turned it into the game it currently is due to low population, and if we're approaching the point where the same will happen to Final Fantasy 14 now.

What was this "Great Trust Change"?

The only things I know that really happened there were a lot of bans that wrecked trust. Obviously, SE isn't repeating that (or the regular banwave reports would look a lot more catastrophic).

Other than that, they started working on this game and virtually abandoned FF11 but if you spend just a day trying to set it up you will see why they had to... it has many times more spaghetti code than FF14 ever will and they've said how it can't be salvaged. They failed to make it into a single player game or whatever they were trying to do and they still have been unable to detach it from PlayOnline.

Its population never reached the levels of this game as far as I know given the amount of people who used computers was less back then, being on less platforms than this and rivals such as WoW.

They started work on FF14 in 2005, so they were planning to abandon FF11 as early as 3 years after it released anyway. So its population decline was inevitable - people were going to jump ship to the new one and wreck its population regardless.

Anyway, for as many that might develop distrust, I guarantee there are plenty that are filled with trust because I meet them in the game all the time. Either they are unphased older players like myself or newer players that have a backlog of things to do or are completely satisfied by the social environment of the game. You could argue a fair share of raiders will be satisfied by the sheer amount of high-end duties these days if they aren't wound up about rotations and metas and just enjoy classes for what they are.

[BigCheez]

It was still a case of Square-Enix "future-proofing" Final Fantasy 11 to make it playable alone regardless of whether the game was abandoned by too many people or having two remaining populations that didn't want to play together (old versus new in this case). Now we have Final Fantasy 14, being left behind for other games, and casual and hardcores divided more than ever. It's the same abandonment and population split, it's just coming through in a different (and more negative) way, heralded by an especially divisive expansion.

Another thing is that there technically IS "another MMO" in Square-Enix's pipeline to further account for possibly sweeping changes to Final Fantasy 14, and that's... Final Fantasy 14, Mobile Edition. Given SE's track record as a whole, or how they almost did the "abandon PC version, get everyone to the mobile version" for FF11, there's some churning in the water here that shouldn't be ignored about the future of the PC version of FF14, or more specifically, how they're going to "proof" it too.

I'm kind of confused as to where you're going with this.

Yes, trusts (and other systems) were introduced in FFXI to make it easier for new players to get into the game and play through the story content solo due to the shift in the ecosystem making it very difficult for new players to catch up otherwise. The equivalent system in FFXIV is already there - it's duty support. They just need to add support for some of the remaining content that isn't covered by it and then it's done.

There were no plans to shut down the PC version of FFXI in favour of the mobile version. Like the FFXIV mobile game, it was outsourced to a 3rd party and was likely just intended to be an additional revenue stream for SE without them having to put a great deal of work into it. It was cancelled fairly early on in development.