Quote Originally Posted by mallleable View Post
MMOs as a whole don't seem to be gaining new players
I don't agree with that. This MMO gains new players. I know because I am in places where I can see the age of many players. While many are in their 30s, many are actually around 20-22.

Which means that in order to have played MMOs for a long time, they would have to have been playing since they became a teenager, and that's still not long relative to 30-50 year olds that have played them since the 2000s.

It is rather that certain MMOs don't gain new players, due to having poor systems that turn off new players quickly, or have a reputation for being riddled with toxic veteran players that are very unwelcoming.

While many people like to say that MMOs are now only a tiny percentage of the internet, it is important to clarify that the majority of the internet is mobile users, games consoles, casual family machines or business computers. Obviously. So if you subtract all those, you arrive back at the sort of "hardcore PC users" you had in the 2000s.

And those "hardcore PC users" are a higher percentage than they were back then and many of them still play MMOs or have at some point, hence the "30 million adventurers" SE is keen to boast about. One way or another, millions of people have attempted to play the game at some point since 2010.
I think MMOs have lagged behind other games, and need to evolve.
Perhaps, but on the other hand it may be better to think of all live service games generally to find this desired innovation.

I don't think it's wrong to look at mobile games, but they do need to acknowledge that the PC market is literally this game's niche that it holds a large amount of market share and awareness in, and trading that to be "just another mobile game", especially when we already have an FFXIV Mobile version already now, isn't very wise.

Quote Originally Posted by Kisshu View Post
their idea was that 24 experienced players would guide 24 new players through it. When reality is, your players just don't act like that. At this point they should already know this.
Actually, players would do that, but the content has to be designed correctly for it. If only 24 people have to do mechanics and the other 24 people can get every single mechanic wrong, then absolutely, the other 24 people can and will carry them.

After all, you see it with Alliance Raids. Lots of people can wipe in these or in Delubrum Reginae and still clear.

However, if 1 person can wipe everyone ie. FT traps or Chaotic's cloud phase, obviously they are not going to want to deal with the frustration at a certain point, and will only want players that are confident. The oversight was having a few mechanics in FT that made players feel that way and it wasn't their intention. They overshot and admitted this.

The reason for them thinking it can work is in part due to how guides and raidplans get made and everyone follows them. It works out quite well at getting lots of players to do the easiest extremes or unreals, for example.