FF14 player count reached the lowest point in 4 years. We lost 75% of the playerbase.

[Voidmage]

It is frightening to see the game that empty. Even on popularted data centers amount of activity is very low. Influx of new players is very low and very slow, sloggish start does not helps. I can not bring any friends into game because they are facing multiple hunderds of hours grind (or extra $50) before they will be able to do any relevant content.
Please allow new people to start in latest expansion.

What "relevant" content?
The endgame is simply the weekly raiding scene.

The problem isn't the long story up to endgame but that it's so extremely boring to do it with the state of the jobs, dungeons and trials till DT being in an atrocious state.

The story is the main selling point of this game and if people want to play that game they either know that or do it BECAUSE of the story.
I don't mind a skip personally but it's not the solution people think it is because what then? You simply are bored with the endgame.

The whole path to that needs to be interesting again with jobs being fun and content like crystal tower being properly addressed.
I would bet money, that would address a good number of issues already for new players because at least from what I have seen and felt myself by replaying the whole thing is that the story itself is fine but the whole construct around it is boring.

People act like there don't exist players who genuinely enjoy starting a game for the story.
This whole community has become so endgame obsessed nowadays or have forgotten their own journey.

The early game design needs to change from a gameplay perspective and not just giving a story skip.
I would bet, that if Ifrit wasn't a laughing stock that dies as soon as a newborn coughs at, then new players could and probably would enjoy the early game far more.

[BlisteringFrost]

Helping a newbie friend level up is 100% just letting them do 5 minutes of overworld stuff, watch 2 hours of cutscenes, then they need 20 minutes of actual help in their next dungeon.

And dawg. That's depressing.

[Little_Giant]

Pay extra $50 or do hundreds of hours msq is one of the reason why influx of players is low. That people are against it being included(optional) for new players is baffling to me.

It's simple not easy to get into ffxiv. Early ffxiv is not good and need a heavy remake. Standards change and ffxiv is not keeping up.

[Infindox]

How bout checking Primal and Dynamis which are pretty dead??


EDit: That being said, is the game in a bad spot? No. On the other hand, it is not in a good spot either, especially with the latest census out and how abysmal OC and FT rates are.

Dynamis is always dead like that. The only time I ever saw it as busy as Aether was the first week or so when it was new, and people made alts to see what was up. I still have an alt there and the difference between my main's Limsa and the alt's Limsa is night and day.

But yes OC and FT failed miserably and that drove a lot of people away because they thought it would be like Eureka and/or Bozja again. I think we will have some people checking out the MH collab and the people who are into Deep Dungeon, but the amount of people won't last long at all.

[Supersnow845]

We have lost so many people from the peak of the exodus we are genuinly at a level of players that an absolute radical top down change of the game for the benefit of the so called “no chance of staying” that may have been to the detriment of the existing players may have actually led to us having more players right now

Abandoning the exodus players has done nothing but led to them all abandoning the game AND the game can’t even hold onto the players it abandoned the exodus players to try to keep

[Infindox]

I wish the new deep dungeon had the Quantum system in it but it is not. The Quantum system is for a special edition of the final level 100 boss fight that you manually queue for at an NPC outside of the dungeon. It requires a premade group and you then use your tokens to specify the difficulty. The new deep dungeon in 7.35 will be the same model as all of the previous versions.

If the new system works well for this fight, they will look at adding it to the future fights. Thats the official line but they are already fully commited to Quantum, what they will do with our input is tuning. They are going to use it heavily in 8.x as a way to reduce operational costs for the game.

Consider this a preview, nothing more.

Yes and no, the new deep dungeon, iirc, you are able to use matched parties the whole way down to the bottom, which we have not been able to do for any of the other versions. It's not the Quantum system, but they did say if it went well, they would update the other DDs with it.

[Hyperia]

Per Steam Charts and Lucky Bancho, the game’s population is back to December 2020 numbers, that’s a 5 year low. What is really wild is that these numbers include a lengthy free login campaign.

We went from 42,181 to 14,250 since the release of DT, yes we lost 67% of the players to date.

[Striker44]

Per Steam Charts and Lucky Bancho, the game’s population is back to December 2020 numbers, that’s a 5 year low. What is really wild is that these numbers include a lengthy free login campaign.

We went from 42,181 to 14,250 since the release of DT, yes we lost 67% of the players to date.

Again, despite what doomers want to believe, this is actually pretty normal at this point in an expansion. The high mark you noted was July 2024 compared to the low mark being one year later July 2025.

Compare to EW. Endwalker's high was 53,729 in its release month of December 2021. Exactly one year later in December 2022 it hit a low point of 18,445. The drop? Yep - 66%.

Or how about ShB, widely praised as the "best" expansion. Its release month of July 2019 was 23,105. Just 5 months later (December 2019), it was down to 9,693. The drop? 58%. We can only speculate how much farther the low would have been at the one-year mark, because by July 2020 covid was in full swing and the population was up because everyone was stuck at home.

Again - what we're experiencing is nothing out of the ordinary. We lost 2/3 of the players by this point in EW, and might have even lost more in the "best expansion ever" ShB at the same point if it hadn't been for covid.

[Supersnow845]

The problem you are conveniently ignoring with the census is the proportion of new players entering the game has NEVER been lower than it is now and DT holds the awful distinction of being the ONLY expansion where the x.0 new player numbers are actually lower than the previous expansion (x-1).5 patch

New player interest in the game is collapsing and attrition of the top heavy playerbase is accelerating, looking at the change from 7.2-7.3 we gained a negligible amount of new players and simply lost existing players even with a free login campaign

A game can’t survive off its top end legacy playerbase and since we made the genius decision to spit on the largest well of new players we will ever get I don’t know where they think they will get more new players in the future

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Funny how hunt trains are even mentioned, because I recalled seeing similar numbers of players in each instances back in ShB days and DC travel wasn't even a thing back then. If you're seeing the same numbers today when DC travel is included in the factor, that really doesn't inspire confidence lol. Especially over here in Aether when you join any trains at all, you will bound to see non-aether people that's not just from Dynamis but also from Primal and Crystal.