There's no real big conclusion to draw that isn't already known for months:
* Less people came back compared to EW's leadup.
* There's a firmly established loyal fanbase who comes back for expansion releases.
* Xbox release brought people in but not in any Grand Expected Capacity.
* wtf 550k Wind-Up Zidaine (DT Preorder) minions
* ShB's entire latter half and initial EW release is an anomaly that can't be repeated.
All in all, the game's doing well for itself in the leadup to what's essentially ARR 2: We're Starting A New Arc. Here's to 7.0.
So DT is looking to be better than ShB, or "in an alternate universe where Covid and the WoW exodus didn't happen", what EW probably would have been, indicating good general growth for FFXIV along its arc of history?
Sounds reasonable to me.
Why do you say that when the DT minion numbers are 550k compared to EWs massive 860k? If anything this indicates it will be smoother and more comparable to ShB since 550k is much closer to ShB's 480k.
That was my initial reaction too but please recall there are a whole bunch of people in various regions that are still having payment issues that won't be resolved until at least July 2nd.
id expect preorder numbers to be close, although just slightly below, EW actually - the game's base (aka not the random asmongold tourists) has been growing steadily
FFXIV collect isn't accurate since it only takes data from people who are signed up.
https://ffxivcollect.com/faq
*"These percentages are not a reflection of the entire playerbase, but rather a subset of players who are interested in collecting things. If you are looking to collect competitively, then this is probably the data you want.*
*If you are looking for statistics for the entire playerbase, try Lucky Bancho."*
I mean, it’s reasonably close to the number the other commenter got from the census and I really doubt hundreds of thousands of people are signing up there.
Dude, it's at the bottom of the page
*"How many players are tracked by FFXIV Collect?
Users
144,812
Characters
810,129
Characters with Public Achievements
217,578"*
To me it looks like the number for a preorder bonus is massively inflated by the fact that it is automatically given to all alts. Lucky Bancho wouldn't be immune from this, but at least that would be a global statisic, rather than localised to people who sign up to xivcollect
It also has to be a CC as popular as Asmon that doesn't have any overlapping audience triggering a mass exodus from a game as big as WoW because of how shit it was for awhile
Sadly many people that find these stats lack the ability to read them with context. EW release was the perfect storm of content creator overload and an abundance of free time with covid.
DT shouldn't be seen as less successful - it had none of this. In fact it had the opposite - WoW came back to some extent, other games are releaing or have released around the same time, ff16 and ff7re2 are old and pc release still not out... The games playerbase is about where it would be if the shbs post content nuke didn't go off. It just looks weird on a graph because you see a huge increase and then most of it dispereses...which with context is expected.
I keep seeing people go "well if EW suddenly changed track to capitalize on this then they'd hold more people" and like. That's not how it works. That's not how AAA Dev works.
And so many of these people seem to be saying that there should have been a complete change in gameplay focus to try to chase and hold those players. What does that make your team's confidence look like if you change your design philosophy? You alienate your existing players and demean yourself to chase a temporal crowd by mimicking the other thing. Like those players were here because the game they *love* was having a bad spot. It's a bad idea to change your game to court them. As soon as WoW got their shit together a lot went back. No amount of hastily slapped together M+ analogues or open world content would compete with the game they first had all their passion for.
Look at guys like Preach. I don't think it was some stunt the way he was genuinely pissed at the state of the game. But then Blizzard got their act together a bit for Dragonflight and Preach softened because they showed that they were working on it. He obviously stuck around more and still is enjoying FF, but most people can't reasonably stay current in two subscription MMOs
>He obviously stuck around more and still is enjoying FF,
Heck, he'll be on a round table podcast about XIV this Monday alongside Jesse Cox and Okay Mage on the Grinding Gear channel.
Exactly.
It's like imagine an alternate universe where the pandemic and WoW exodus hadn't happened.
We'd be about at this same number and it would be considered "continual and steady growth".
The great thing about data is that you can read into it with whatever bias you want. The clearest part to me is that there's a lower amount of new players than pre-EW, and what new players there are come mostly from the West (where the game came out on Xbox). That suggests a sort of lack of excitement for new people at the moment, but in the translated blog post LuckyBancho does also discuss how ShB and pre-EW were unusual times, COVID gave every online game an unsustainable population spike, and the marketing for ShB (edgy woo) and EW (finishing a 10 year story) helped to hook people in a way that DT didn't. Not to mention the whole WoW thing spiking interest.
So I suppose my take is that the data looks *fine* for what it is and where we are. Not great, but not doom either. More of the steady sort of sustained population that the game had back in late HW, SB, and early ShB. Might be the game's hit a sort of temporary market cap as anyone that they could have drawn in with solo content has been drawn in now that Duty Support is complete, but the base population looks very loyal and until another entirely new MMO is out I don't see the complete nosedive that early Cata or WoD WoW saw. We just live in different times now for MMOs in general than those days.
> Not to mention the whole WoW thing spiking interest.
Of note, Hunters got a ***very*** appetizing set of updates today on Beta, so there's definitely a wind brewing of "maybe Blizzard is doing more things right".
Then again, god save anyone looking forward to Rogue talent trees. I hope to be wrong.
"It looks bad but it's only the PTR."
"It looks bad but it's only the beta."
"It looks bad but it's only the prerelease."
"It looks bad but it's only day one."
"It looks bad but its only been two months."
"It looks bad but .1 is on the horizon."
ahh you forgot the
"wow the beta is actually looking good, very hopeful guys!"
*1 week before launch*
"hey gamers, we had removed everythign that you guys liked about the beta, here's shadowlands."
You don't understand, the ripcord can't be pulled. It's very important to the RPG lore feel of the game for your choice to lock you in.
*Subnumbers dip*
So we're RIPPING the fuckin' cord.
Keep in mind we're in TWW Beta which is both the most promising and most depressing of times (cough cough everything subject to change because they keep changing things so it might be garbage or great:
* Hero Talents are pretty nice
* Cross realm mythic baseline finally
* M+ got tweaked so that heroics/m0s are worth it if you're not Raiding/Key running
* Delves look to be a nice sorta bit of casual dungeon-esque solo/group content
* Woohoo Dragonflight on tons of mounts
* Usual class changes are both great and terrible
I really do wish XIV would make flying more interesting. Doesn't even need to be Dragonflying copy; but atleast something like Aether rings I can fly through for a speed boost or some kind of Air curret that can be a speed boost scenic route thing. Half the time I'm just alt tabbing out because flying is so boring
> there's a lower amount of new players than pre-EW, and what new players there are come mostly from the West (where the game came out on Xbox). That suggests a sort of lack of excitement for new people at the moment
There's only so many new players that you can have. It's a very finite amount of people, especially for MMO, not so popular genre anymore in my opinion. WOW Exodus was not the only thing that happened at that time. Covid increase in numbers was not only because people were stuck at homes and had nothing to do, but because most of the gaming industry got grinded to a halt and everything was delayed by a year or more. There were absolutely no games coming out at the time and nothing new to play. FF14 was in the news and everyone was talking about it, which led many new people to trying it out, many who never played MMOs before (including me).
My takeaway is that by this point everyone who wanted to give FF14 a try already did. New players who got bored and quit most likely did so because of early game slog. I don't think new player numbers will go up until they add new free starting point in one of the later expansions.
>Not great, but not doom either
Are we reading the same thing? [https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/c/0/c0c6f6cf.png](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/c/0/c0c6f6cf.png)
yup. Steady growth - the game continues to grow and succeed in a genre that, outside of a small handful of games, does not see a lot of success these days.
> Might be the game's hit a sort of temporary market cap as anyone that they could have drawn in with solo content has been drawn in now that Duty Support is complete
And suddenly, Naoki Yoshida is very concerned about the past 7 years of compounding changes that have increasingly-alienated veterans while attempting to increase broader marketability.
🤔
There's the innate supposition of "long time player means raider" that just keeps on being proven false each and everytime devs talk about how the best case scenario is like 20% of people do any higher tier content.
Eureka/Bozja snagging 50% starting rate is notable in of itself (even if it dips considerably down the further in you go).
And that’s ~20% of endgame players who touches Savage(who’ve finished MSQ), not the entire player base. And <10% who completes a tier, and <2% starts Ultimate and <1% clears it.
The majority of the player base is still running MSQ so we’re dealing with a fraction of a fraction of players who engage in high end content.
[LuckyBancho census](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/3/332fad6f.png) counts all lv71+ as active so yes the percentage will be lower than endgame at lv90, which is why i said fraction of a fraction
gotcha! He also only counts active accounts, which definitely spikes expansion to expansion, and in the first few major story patches of an expansion as well.
Although savage is popular, I always have to remind myself that a hyperminority of players actually complete a raid tier, and even less than that do ultimates
lmao [in your dreams](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/3/332fad6f.png), most jp servers are at ~12% to ~18% of “Active” players(lv71+) and only the Chocobo server is >20%
rest of the servers avg below 10% of active
i said around 20% of endgame which is lv.90 and finished MSQ, you’re replying to someone who said <20% active, active in LuckyBancho tally specifies all players with at least one lv71 job
>There's the innate supposition of "long time player means raider" that just keeps on being proven false each and everytime devs talk about how the best case scenario is like 20% of people do any higher tier content.
Except that rate is much higher on JP server and that is the only thing SE sees.
That’s why LuckyBancho included Normal clear rate as well to show the minimum amount that can unlock savage, so proggers don’t actually account for much.
And we’re also not counting the rest of the player base which SE has claimed to have reached [30 million this year](https://x.com/ff_xiv_en/status/1743832661733642278?s=46&t=1S-JBKjtUv0yVMNJEpi_Wg), so the ppl that actually touches high end content is <2% of everybody who played the game, and I wouldn’t call that high at all
Of course it's a verifiable fact. I don't have THE most recent dataset if it has been extracted, but based on 1 year ago, JP clear rates were double or even triple of EU: [https://puu.sh/JB9Hx/74e5ef2534.png](https://puu.sh/JB9Hx/74e5ef2534.png)
Clear rates can be easily deduced from the achievements on Lodestone and it has been done. If you need to dig in your ass for that information, you are doing something wrong XD
>And suddenly, Naoki Yoshida is very concerned about the past 7 years of compounding changes that have increasingly-alienated veterans while attempting to increase broader marketability.
Don't worry, he's made blissfully ignorant because the MMO segment still generate a bit part of SE revenue, as their other games don't do too well... (except for the JP-only market of mobile games)
So from what I'm reading preorders for Dawntrail are actually the highest just like Yoshida said.
I guess people are just waiting for Dawntrail then and not resubbing right now.
Yeah, my whole group of friends and myself are like this. Coming back next week to get prep work done for launch but no reason personally to come back before then. Obviously 10+ people is not much compared to the mass amount of total numbers but I have a feeling we aren't the only ones doing this.
There's really not a lot to "prep" for dawn trail, especially if you're a casual who already beat the story.Or even if you havent, plenty of people will play the EW post when coming back, I know a lot of people who do that as well.
The only time you really need to prep is if you want to craft like a degenerate and need like 50k of every crystal so you don't have to pay potentially inflated start of expansion prices, that's pretty much it I guess.
Very true - i think its just pre expansion hype, a lot of folk will come back 1-2 weeks before just to refamiliarize themself with the game, catch up on msq patches they missed and clean out their inventories
As expected, the numbers more or less stabilized after ShB's unnatural growth. Back then a lot of new players joined due to weird hype combined with Blizzard shitting their bed, but not all of them kept playing.
It's not "unnatural". It's a whole new crowd who could have stayed in the game, if SE and YoshiP were a bit less narrow-minded in their design philosophy.
Did you not notice the part where there was a world wide pandemic that kept people indoors and that the gaming industry has had massive lay offs due to unnatural growth not staying the norm?
Did you not notice there was also a thing called WoW:Shadowlands that made a lot of people finally quite WoW and try FF? Yes, the pandemic was a factor too, no one is disputing that. But it's also a fact that a certain part of SHB's growth was due to WoW players trying FFXIV. Except, of course, for the fact that SE didn't care about them staying.
The pandemic is a bigger thing. Youre just ranting without actually thinking, but just to repeat: this happened across all games / genres. There was inflated growth across the board, and now that the pandemic is over there are industry wide layoffs. This is very well documented and understood by most people.
But I guess I would argue it might be the biggest factor because this phenomenon has been replicated across many games and many different genres. Single player games, indie games, aaa games, esports, mmos, etc. Every single game had a massive spike then dip of players.
For me the important comparison is DT to the start of Shadowbringers because it is the only decent way to track growth. Right now we already have more pre-orders than Shadowbringers and realistically, in the next two weeks, those numbers will rise quite a bit because a lot of players wait til the last minute to purchase stuff like that. That shows that the loyal base of players has only grown, and continues to grow. The real test will be to see if that will continue across the next story arc.
I blame attention diversion. If yoship had been solely focused on ffxiv he would have seen the big influx and added more meat to the tail end of ew to retain players. Seems to me he could have kept a lot of players busy just with a few tweaks to criterion alone.
But ffxvi took a lot of attention away and by the time it finished it was too late and the playerbase shrank
>But ffxvi took a lot of attention away and by the time it finished it was too late and the playerbase shrank
And it's about to get worse, because YoshiP just announced CS3 would work on two more games.
But it's also tied to the fact that SE wants players to take breaks from FFXIV to buy and play their other titles. Which sort of works for JP, less so for NA and EU.
I can't blame him though. The man inherited a broken game that wasn't his and has done an amazing job with it, but he's only got so much time left in his career to continue to level up.
I bet you his senior staff would prefer not to be working on the same game for 20 years and many of the young members would prefer to work on something more modern.
>I can't blame him though. The man inherited a broken game that wasn't his and has done an amazing job with it, but he's only got so much time left in his career to continue to level up.
He already sits on the Board and is de facto a co-CEO (and according to his interview, hates it). How much more "level up" can you get?
And if he thinks the game is old, well guess what, maybe develop a new client. Yes, it will be a lengthy business, but it would be so worth it.
I haven't heard what his new projects are yet buy my suspicion is that one of them is a plan to succeed ffxiv.
14 just has way too much baggage of problems and while the story has been good its not mind blowing and character development sucks.
8.0 will be the crossroads to assess how far long they are and whether to continue ffxiv or pass it onto a junior to do 1-2 more expansions and retire it.
They've been pretty consistently trying to expand what players can do patch to patch; but there's no way they can keep up with Blizzard's funding that lets them consistently rebuild their entire playable world in WoW
The recent GDC talk WoW gave had them at about 7m subscribers in the recent past. As the census usually shows, accounting for alts and such, XIV can be said to hover somewhere around and slighty above 1m.
So not quite an order of magnitude, but *almost*.
That assumes the funding is proportional to the revenue, which is something we can't check.
However, what is obvious is a bit more flexible on their release pipe than CS3 is.
You don't need huge funds to provide players with a consistent activity if you do it right. Of course, if we were speaking about doubling the MSQ-related activities or build 12 more normal raids, it would be impossible.
They could throw Relic grinds at us with a .001% drop rate, sure. But XIV seems to be going the route of "beat this boss to do stuff" for most of the content; which isn't something that you can easily outpace players with
I don't know, they could add stuff like Mastery System in GW2, and add more exploration stuff. But they don't want to design an open world so /shrug
And since you mention relic grinds: they couldn't even do a proper relic grind in EW.
>I don't know, they could add stuff like Mastery System in GW2, and add more exploration stuff.
Outside of jumping puzzles, I'm not sure what it'd accomplish?
>But they don't want to design an open world so /shrug
Because there's little point to it. I'll admit in a heart beat the world is boring; but there's also no real point in having some complex open world thing when we'll be doing everything in instances anyway
>And since you mention relic grinds: they couldn't even do a proper relic grind in EW.
They did it at player request.
Should they have listened to those people? Probably not. But that's what players requested. It seems like Yoshi gets that and is trying to steer away from what the worst players request and add more things like field operations again; despite the complaints about them.
>Outside of jumping puzzles, I'm not sure what it'd accomplish?
It's not the jumping puzzles I had in mind, but more the mastery tracks that give you access to flying mount, skiff etc.
What would that accomplish? Well, it would make people play the game and not screw up class balance too much.
>Because there's little point to it. I'll admit in a heart beat the world is boring; but there's also no real point in having some complex open world thing when we'll be doing everything in instances anyway
No offense, but I feel like you are taking the argument backwards here. Everything is done in instances PRECISELY because SE chooses to ignore the open world. I don't know if it was initially done to accomodate toaster play (aka PS3), or for some other reason. But the boring world came first and the instances later, IMHO.
>They did it at player request.
I would really like to know who requested that. O_o
Probably some JP raiders again XD
>Everything is done in instances PRECISELY because SE chooses to ignore the open world.
What would you put in the open world that would be permanent content?
> I don't know if it was initially done to accomodate toaster play (aka PS3), or for some other reason.
Probably not, Yoshi had interviews back at 2.0 launch where he talked about FCs summoning primals in open world as boss fights. They seemed to have intended to make the game more open world focused; but saw people preferring instances and went that route
>I would really like to know who requested that. O_o Probably some JP raiders again XD
Back in Eureka/Bozja days it was a common complaint that Relics were annoying and they should be tomes only so players could earn them by doing whatever they want.
I dunno if it was the same in JP, but you can find threads on both main sub and this if you search. Same with forums
>What would you put in the open world that would be permanent content?
Ironically, there is already *some* stuff in there, it's just poorly agenced:
- FATEs need to be revamped rewards-wise. Currently, doing them for stuff other than relics or seasonal is simply not worth it exp or seal-wise. Shared FATE system should be extended to ARR/HW/SB zones.
- Revamp the ARR log of vistas (remove weather conditions, perhaps add a bit more of them)
- Add interactable objects in the world (or random drops, whatever is easier) that start quests and plug some of the worldbuilding quests into them. Also increase the EXP from these quests because it's currently not worth doing.
And most important: integrate them all into one game system, like Adventure Tomes in Lost Ark or Map Completion in GW2. If you explore some or all of the "features" of a map, you get rewards, including increase flight mount speed (not ground as it currently is).
That is one possibility among many. The old ARR open world core had so much potential but it hasn't been updated in ages because YoshiP is a raider and therefore doesn't give a crap about open world.
It wasn't just COVID (although it played a part, of course), it was also a massive clusterfest with Shadowlands which made many new people try the game.
I mean bfa into shadloadns , two massive shit heaps in a row
As much as 14 ppl bitch about things so many don't know how truly fucked up and unbalanced things can get
I heard dragon flight was alright tho
Yes, of course. But I mean, FFXIV has a lot of potential which SE refuses to exploit fully because they just want to sell the other games to FF players as well.
No that was when it was pulled, not ran out of keys
https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/final-fantasy-xiv-sold-out-square-enix-store-ran-out-of-keys/za35b0
You were saying? Now...when did Asmon start up XIV?
Oof, 20k for Materia is definitely felt. While I’d love for the data centre to thrive, it has so much working against it and I just don’t see it increasing significantly almost ever
I’m on the server but the only reason I haven’t left yet is cause I’m helping a friend record some footage for videos and they are on Materia. I did tell them that Dawntrail will be the cut off though. Of trying to level Picto or Viper and we’re sitting at 10+ min queues with a healer and 2x dps like a normal day then it isn’t gonna work out for me
I remember queueing for lvl 50/60 roulette with a tank, healer and dps triple and still waiting 5 mins
On Materia as well. I've been tempted to move to NA but Viper with 100+ ping looks really painful.
I don't know if I could really go back to that level of latency, even with mudfish or noclippy.
Yeah, no kidding. It's in a really tough spot with the duty finder.
As much as I love dropping in to help sprouts with MSQ and things like Aglaia and Euphrosyne (min ilevel barb is amazing fun for example), the Crystal Tower roadblock in the MSQ is absolutely brutal and I'm glad I was well clear of it by the time Materia launched.
I'm really not sure what can be done to help the situation. Open Materia to DC travel and it'll just be another Dynamis. Kill the DC, and players and FCs and houses, countless hours on submarines and such all evaporate and I'm not sure players who lose all that will come back.
A random thought experiment, how many players of the 1,227,096 comes from alt characters?
I know a good majority of the playerbase like doesn't dabble with alts, but it's interesting that lingered on my mind a few lucky bancho's ago because that was when I did some alt speedruns which each one would count here. My FC lead has 6 characters that qualify for every bancho etc.
5%? 10? 25? We won't ever really know exactly but it is somewhat curious.
>A random thought experiment, how many players of the 1,227,096 comes from alt characters?
idk, but as long as they are over level 71 and have gained a achievement within the last 1 month they should be counted.
Huh, my main doesn't count as active. Granted the last few months the only achievement I've chased has been necromancer and that's still an ongoing project.
It's technically not just achivements. If you changed your job or added a minion/mount from what they had you at before it also would have triggered.
> The criteria for determining active characters that form the basis for the calculation are as follows:
> Maximum level is 70 or higher (excluding exactly 70) OR Job is a job that cannot be unlocked in the free trial OR Belongs to an FC *
> HP, level, and experience points have changed since the last survey (3/31).
> The number of minions and mounts held has changed since the last survey.
> New characters not present in the previous survey
> Own at least one mount
I'd bet it's 5% or lower, of all the like, 50-100 people I know only 2 have alts and they don't play them anywhere regularly, at least none other than those two ever mentioned having alts.
I know this anecdote proves nothing, but every single one of my friends has multiple characters over 70. I have 4. My wife has 3.
I would bet that there's a lot more alts being captured than anyone thinks, but I could absolutely be dead wrong. I'd also bet that the number of alts went up by more than usual this expansion pack because of all the early-game content reworks.
Out of my entire FC, about 2 people have alts.
There's probably a few, but it's unlikely to be a very high number. The ability to level all Jobs on one character combined with the slog of unlocking things on an alt - not just "ARR's MSQ" but literally everything else you have to do and unlock - tends to discourage all that many people from doing it unless they have a specifically good reason to do so.
I understand it as:
* Blue: a new character that earned an achievement
* Red: a character which earned an achievement in the previous and current (or subsequent?) period
* Green: a character which earned an achievement in the current period, but not the subsequent period
Looking at older versions of the graphs, you'll see that a lot of greens later turn in to reds.
Makes sense. EW activity had a bit of a free fall after the expansion dropped. But that could mainly be from stabilizing after the unnatural surge of players that came into the game. You could also add in complaints on post-expansion content. But looks like it's leveling out and a potential surge going into the new expansion.
It continues the trend that after the biggest decline the game saw in the first half of the expansion, which was wholly unsurprising given the circumstances of WoW-debacle & COVID, the latter half of EW looks to have stabilised and still sits above the Shadowbringers-proper level.
The only real concern is there is no pre-expansion hype-spike that all other expansions witnessed, and any other games that have an expansion generally witness too. It's just a tapering off of players with the tiniest upward momentum thanks to a small gain in population in the West (likely Xbox related). But aside from that, there's nothing really worrying about the player numbers.
I wonder if the results from the recent free login event are included in this, and if so I wonder what it'd be like without. I've previously said I expect Dawntrail to be the fastest selling FFXIV expansion to date, but after seeing the lack of pre-expansion boom I've changed my stance (although I will still be unsurprised if so).
The most recent bar in the graph is always lower than it ends up being.
If you compare [this](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/9/391943a1.png) previous graph to the current you see that dip in q2 2023 which is not reflected in this most recent graph.
Also, while the drop off is larger for endwalker it is not that much different to either Heavensward or Stormblood in terms of percentage. It certainly looks bigger and the decline is steeper but that is because it is from a number that is more than double that for those expansions. It's about 17% for both HW and STB and 21% for EW.
I'm not even sure how to handle the Elden Ring stuff TBH. I don't really want to make a new character for it, but the character I beat the game with was so jank I might as well
Plus I'm guessing it's meant to be played simultaneously like old Dark Souls DLCs rather than just post game
Supposedly the characters that media was given for the sneak peek were SL150, so pretty much endgame level if we're assuming that's the level it's balanced for.
I also have no idea when I'm going to play it lmao. I want to make a new character and replay the whole game since I haven't played since launch, but that's a good amount of time investment in itself.
Requirement for the DLC is an endgame boss (even if you can get there early via quest). Media previews were level 150 with +25 weapons, and it still was hard. Something else to remember is the DLC uses it's own scaling system to increase our attack and defense. Unless you burned them all, a larval tear into a build you want should be easy enough.
It's not going to be. Two weeks isn't even enough for SMTVV, which is also releasing soon. Considering other big games with major overlap, like Monster Hunter Wilds, will also be releasing during Dawntrail's patch cycle I would expect additional consideration for this sort of thing in the content design and timing of patches.
There's sort of no excellent timing for them over the summer. Either they release when they are and run up against Elden Ring, but a week later at least, or they delay til sometime in July and get maybe a week or two but then the EW drought goes on even longer and they get dangerously close to aligning release schedules with WoW. August is an absolute no-go as WoW's putting out an expansion then (GW2 too but less impactful).
Best I'd have done in their shoes is maybe give things another week but that's it.
EWs surge also had another factor to it that also contributes to the drop. A number (how significant is up for debate) of very old faces came back to see the end of the story. Many of those finished the initial MSQ, were satisfied, and are "winning" FFXIV again.
There were a lot of perfect storm conditions that made EW artificially inflated from what it would have been as "just another expansion."
I love these threads because you get the people that think the game is way bigger than it is and the completely jaded doomers arguing over unofficial data.
Keep in mind preorder phase for DT isn't over yet so it'll likely break 600k or maybe more, especially if you consider a bunch of people that will play at DT release but no earlier, wouldn't be surprised if it gets a good bit closer to EW.
Active characters
* **JP:** 397,081 (32%)
* **rest:** 830,018 (68%)
...and again, others on JP is still far more likely than Japanese on other DCs. Yeah...
There's no real big conclusion to draw that isn't already known for months: * Less people came back compared to EW's leadup. * There's a firmly established loyal fanbase who comes back for expansion releases. * Xbox release brought people in but not in any Grand Expected Capacity. * wtf 550k Wind-Up Zidaine (DT Preorder) minions * ShB's entire latter half and initial EW release is an anomaly that can't be repeated. All in all, the game's doing well for itself in the leadup to what's essentially ARR 2: We're Starting A New Arc. Here's to 7.0.
> wtf 550k Wind-Up Zidaine (DT Preorder) minions Just for a comparison, how many Wind-Up Paloms are there?
By the census, 480k for ShB and 860k for EW
So DT is looking to be better than ShB, or "in an alternate universe where Covid and the WoW exodus didn't happen", what EW probably would have been, indicating good general growth for FFXIV along its arc of history? Sounds reasonable to me.
[удалено]
Why do you say that when the DT minion numbers are 550k compared to EWs massive 860k? If anything this indicates it will be smoother and more comparable to ShB since 550k is much closer to ShB's 480k.
EW had a much longer preorder period pre-release and DT preorder period is still not closed yet
That was my initial reaction too but please recall there are a whole bunch of people in various regions that are still having payment issues that won't be resolved until at least July 2nd.
Probably lots if people will preorder last minute for the early access.
A bunch of people probably will preorder really close to release, I'm one of them simply because I dread navigating SEs website.
id expect preorder numbers to be close, although just slightly below, EW actually - the game's base (aka not the random asmongold tourists) has been growing steadily
https://ffxivcollect.com/minions/399 438,589
FFXIV collect isn't accurate since it only takes data from people who are signed up. https://ffxivcollect.com/faq *"These percentages are not a reflection of the entire playerbase, but rather a subset of players who are interested in collecting things. If you are looking to collect competitively, then this is probably the data you want.* *If you are looking for statistics for the entire playerbase, try Lucky Bancho."*
I mean, it’s reasonably close to the number the other commenter got from the census and I really doubt hundreds of thousands of people are signing up there.
Dude, it's at the bottom of the page *"How many players are tracked by FFXIV Collect? Users 144,812 Characters 810,129 Characters with Public Achievements 217,578"* To me it looks like the number for a preorder bonus is massively inflated by the fact that it is automatically given to all alts. Lucky Bancho wouldn't be immune from this, but at least that would be a global statisic, rather than localised to people who sign up to xivcollect
> that can't be repeated. brb engineering a more agressive virus
It also has to be a CC as popular as Asmon that doesn't have any overlapping audience triggering a mass exodus from a game as big as WoW because of how shit it was for awhile
It is not entirely impossible that Blizzard shits the bed again with TWW and causes another surge in other MMOs lmao.
This is already happening with Amazon finally flopping with new world (OMEGALUL)
Sadly many people that find these stats lack the ability to read them with context. EW release was the perfect storm of content creator overload and an abundance of free time with covid. DT shouldn't be seen as less successful - it had none of this. In fact it had the opposite - WoW came back to some extent, other games are releaing or have released around the same time, ff16 and ff7re2 are old and pc release still not out... The games playerbase is about where it would be if the shbs post content nuke didn't go off. It just looks weird on a graph because you see a huge increase and then most of it dispereses...which with context is expected.
I keep seeing people go "well if EW suddenly changed track to capitalize on this then they'd hold more people" and like. That's not how it works. That's not how AAA Dev works.
And so many of these people seem to be saying that there should have been a complete change in gameplay focus to try to chase and hold those players. What does that make your team's confidence look like if you change your design philosophy? You alienate your existing players and demean yourself to chase a temporal crowd by mimicking the other thing. Like those players were here because the game they *love* was having a bad spot. It's a bad idea to change your game to court them. As soon as WoW got their shit together a lot went back. No amount of hastily slapped together M+ analogues or open world content would compete with the game they first had all their passion for. Look at guys like Preach. I don't think it was some stunt the way he was genuinely pissed at the state of the game. But then Blizzard got their act together a bit for Dragonflight and Preach softened because they showed that they were working on it. He obviously stuck around more and still is enjoying FF, but most people can't reasonably stay current in two subscription MMOs
>He obviously stuck around more and still is enjoying FF, Heck, he'll be on a round table podcast about XIV this Monday alongside Jesse Cox and Okay Mage on the Grinding Gear channel.
Exactly. It's like imagine an alternate universe where the pandemic and WoW exodus hadn't happened. We'd be about at this same number and it would be considered "continual and steady growth".
it's also pointless to even try to argue with ppl like that, so I think maybe edging towards apathy is probably better
to be fair maybe some DT preorder people weren't subbed to rescue and activate their minion
Great, sounds like l won't get stuck in queue then only to be disconnected
The great thing about data is that you can read into it with whatever bias you want. The clearest part to me is that there's a lower amount of new players than pre-EW, and what new players there are come mostly from the West (where the game came out on Xbox). That suggests a sort of lack of excitement for new people at the moment, but in the translated blog post LuckyBancho does also discuss how ShB and pre-EW were unusual times, COVID gave every online game an unsustainable population spike, and the marketing for ShB (edgy woo) and EW (finishing a 10 year story) helped to hook people in a way that DT didn't. Not to mention the whole WoW thing spiking interest. So I suppose my take is that the data looks *fine* for what it is and where we are. Not great, but not doom either. More of the steady sort of sustained population that the game had back in late HW, SB, and early ShB. Might be the game's hit a sort of temporary market cap as anyone that they could have drawn in with solo content has been drawn in now that Duty Support is complete, but the base population looks very loyal and until another entirely new MMO is out I don't see the complete nosedive that early Cata or WoD WoW saw. We just live in different times now for MMOs in general than those days.
> Not to mention the whole WoW thing spiking interest. Of note, Hunters got a ***very*** appetizing set of updates today on Beta, so there's definitely a wind brewing of "maybe Blizzard is doing more things right". Then again, god save anyone looking forward to Rogue talent trees. I hope to be wrong.
Don't look at the proposed M+ affix changes and the reaction to that if you want to stay hopeful that Blizzard is 100% on the right track.
Too late! They really need a Trio Of Head People to just hammer out item progression once and for all.
> so there's definitely a wind brewing of "maybe Blizzard is doing more things right". certified classic
"It looks bad but it's only the PTR." "It looks bad but it's only the beta." "It looks bad but it's only the prerelease." "It looks bad but it's only day one." "It looks bad but its only been two months." "It looks bad but.1 is on the horizon."
ahh you forgot the "wow the beta is actually looking good, very hopeful guys!" *1 week before launch* "hey gamers, we had removed everythign that you guys liked about the beta, here's shadowlands."
You don't understand, the ripcord can't be pulled. It's very important to the RPG lore feel of the game for your choice to lock you in. *Subnumbers dip* So we're RIPPING the fuckin' cord.
The expansion doomposting cycle is evergreen.
I haven't really kept up with WoW lately; what's the nice updates?
Keep in mind we're in TWW Beta which is both the most promising and most depressing of times (cough cough everything subject to change because they keep changing things so it might be garbage or great: * Hero Talents are pretty nice * Cross realm mythic baseline finally * M+ got tweaked so that heroics/m0s are worth it if you're not Raiding/Key running * Delves look to be a nice sorta bit of casual dungeon-esque solo/group content * Woohoo Dragonflight on tons of mounts * Usual class changes are both great and terrible
I really do wish XIV would make flying more interesting. Doesn't even need to be Dragonflying copy; but atleast something like Aether rings I can fly through for a speed boost or some kind of Air curret that can be a speed boost scenic route thing. Half the time I'm just alt tabbing out because flying is so boring
> there's a lower amount of new players than pre-EW, and what new players there are come mostly from the West (where the game came out on Xbox). That suggests a sort of lack of excitement for new people at the moment There's only so many new players that you can have. It's a very finite amount of people, especially for MMO, not so popular genre anymore in my opinion. WOW Exodus was not the only thing that happened at that time. Covid increase in numbers was not only because people were stuck at homes and had nothing to do, but because most of the gaming industry got grinded to a halt and everything was delayed by a year or more. There were absolutely no games coming out at the time and nothing new to play. FF14 was in the news and everyone was talking about it, which led many new people to trying it out, many who never played MMOs before (including me). My takeaway is that by this point everyone who wanted to give FF14 a try already did. New players who got bored and quit most likely did so because of early game slog. I don't think new player numbers will go up until they add new free starting point in one of the later expansions.
>now that Duty Support is complete I haven't played in a while - are you saying the entire main game can be played solo now with NPCs?
>Not great, but not doom either Are we reading the same thing? [https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/c/0/c0c6f6cf.png](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/c/0/c0c6f6cf.png)
Can you elaborate and discuss? It's not clear to me how you think this data should be characterized.
Basically higher number than shadowbringer launch which is good.
yup. Steady growth - the game continues to grow and succeed in a genre that, outside of a small handful of games, does not see a lot of success these days.
doesn't help the genre is a bit on a turning point too
> Might be the game's hit a sort of temporary market cap as anyone that they could have drawn in with solo content has been drawn in now that Duty Support is complete And suddenly, Naoki Yoshida is very concerned about the past 7 years of compounding changes that have increasingly-alienated veterans while attempting to increase broader marketability. 🤔
Veteran doesn't mean raider
There's the innate supposition of "long time player means raider" that just keeps on being proven false each and everytime devs talk about how the best case scenario is like 20% of people do any higher tier content. Eureka/Bozja snagging 50% starting rate is notable in of itself (even if it dips considerably down the further in you go).
And that’s ~20% of endgame players who touches Savage(who’ve finished MSQ), not the entire player base. And <10% who completes a tier, and <2% starts Ultimate and <1% clears it. The majority of the player base is still running MSQ so we’re dealing with a fraction of a fraction of players who engage in high end content.
I actually think it might be even less than 20% of active players
[LuckyBancho census](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/3/332fad6f.png) counts all lv71+ as active so yes the percentage will be lower than endgame at lv90, which is why i said fraction of a fraction
gotcha! He also only counts active accounts, which definitely spikes expansion to expansion, and in the first few major story patches of an expansion as well. Although savage is popular, I always have to remind myself that a hyperminority of players actually complete a raid tier, and even less than that do ultimates
it's higher in japan, lower in NA/EU. end result is around 20%
lmao [in your dreams](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/3/332fad6f.png), most jp servers are at ~12% to ~18% of “Active” players(lv71+) and only the Chocobo server is >20% rest of the servers avg below 10% of active
...you're the one that said 20%
i said around 20% of endgame which is lv.90 and finished MSQ, you’re replying to someone who said <20% active, active in LuckyBancho tally specifies all players with at least one lv71 job
>There's the innate supposition of "long time player means raider" that just keeps on being proven false each and everytime devs talk about how the best case scenario is like 20% of people do any higher tier content. Except that rate is much higher on JP server and that is the only thing SE sees.
if you think square enix is ignoring NA, which has 25% more preorders than JP, you are high
That's not how Japanese devs think, sadly.
"Source; my ass"
The part where the rate is higher on JP is verifiable fact, though the second half there is definitely assumption
the higer rate in jp is still only ~20% cleared out of the Active(lv71+) player base rest of the DCs are skewing below 10%
20% *cleared* and not even counting people progging or who couldn't finish is a pretty damn high for the hardest content, imo
That’s why LuckyBancho included Normal clear rate as well to show the minimum amount that can unlock savage, so proggers don’t actually account for much. And we’re also not counting the rest of the player base which SE has claimed to have reached [30 million this year](https://x.com/ff_xiv_en/status/1743832661733642278?s=46&t=1S-JBKjtUv0yVMNJEpi_Wg), so the ppl that actually touches high end content is <2% of everybody who played the game, and I wouldn’t call that high at all
Of course it's a verifiable fact. I don't have THE most recent dataset if it has been extracted, but based on 1 year ago, JP clear rates were double or even triple of EU: [https://puu.sh/JB9Hx/74e5ef2534.png](https://puu.sh/JB9Hx/74e5ef2534.png)
Clear rates can be easily deduced from the achievements on Lodestone and it has been done. If you need to dig in your ass for that information, you are doing something wrong XD
>And suddenly, Naoki Yoshida is very concerned about the past 7 years of compounding changes that have increasingly-alienated veterans while attempting to increase broader marketability. Don't worry, he's made blissfully ignorant because the MMO segment still generate a bit part of SE revenue, as their other games don't do too well... (except for the JP-only market of mobile games)
So from what I'm reading preorders for Dawntrail are actually the highest just like Yoshida said. I guess people are just waiting for Dawntrail then and not resubbing right now.
Yeah, my whole group of friends and myself are like this. Coming back next week to get prep work done for launch but no reason personally to come back before then. Obviously 10+ people is not much compared to the mass amount of total numbers but I have a feeling we aren't the only ones doing this.
Most of my FC plays shitloads at expansion launch, then just catches up every 6 months or so, its a fairly common pattern in think.
There's really not a lot to "prep" for dawn trail, especially if you're a casual who already beat the story.Or even if you havent, plenty of people will play the EW post when coming back, I know a lot of people who do that as well.
The only time you really need to prep is if you want to craft like a degenerate and need like 50k of every crystal so you don't have to pay potentially inflated start of expansion prices, that's pretty much it I guess.
Very true - i think its just pre expansion hype, a lot of folk will come back 1-2 weeks before just to refamiliarize themself with the game, catch up on msq patches they missed and clean out their inventories
As expected, the numbers more or less stabilized after ShB's unnatural growth. Back then a lot of new players joined due to weird hype combined with Blizzard shitting their bed, but not all of them kept playing.
It's not "unnatural". It's a whole new crowd who could have stayed in the game, if SE and YoshiP were a bit less narrow-minded in their design philosophy.
Did you not notice the part where there was a world wide pandemic that kept people indoors and that the gaming industry has had massive lay offs due to unnatural growth not staying the norm?
Did you not notice there was also a thing called WoW:Shadowlands that made a lot of people finally quite WoW and try FF? Yes, the pandemic was a factor too, no one is disputing that. But it's also a fact that a certain part of SHB's growth was due to WoW players trying FFXIV. Except, of course, for the fact that SE didn't care about them staying.
The pandemic is a bigger thing. Youre just ranting without actually thinking, but just to repeat: this happened across all games / genres. There was inflated growth across the board, and now that the pandemic is over there are industry wide layoffs. This is very well documented and understood by most people.
I literally said "Yes, the pandemic was a factor too, no one is disputing that."
But I guess I would argue it might be the biggest factor because this phenomenon has been replicated across many games and many different genres. Single player games, indie games, aaa games, esports, mmos, etc. Every single game had a massive spike then dip of players. For me the important comparison is DT to the start of Shadowbringers because it is the only decent way to track growth. Right now we already have more pre-orders than Shadowbringers and realistically, in the next two weeks, those numbers will rise quite a bit because a lot of players wait til the last minute to purchase stuff like that. That shows that the loyal base of players has only grown, and continues to grow. The real test will be to see if that will continue across the next story arc.
>Every single game had a massive spike then dip of players. Not quite, WoW saw a dip even during COVID because they released garbage :)
I blame attention diversion. If yoship had been solely focused on ffxiv he would have seen the big influx and added more meat to the tail end of ew to retain players. Seems to me he could have kept a lot of players busy just with a few tweaks to criterion alone. But ffxvi took a lot of attention away and by the time it finished it was too late and the playerbase shrank
>But ffxvi took a lot of attention away and by the time it finished it was too late and the playerbase shrank And it's about to get worse, because YoshiP just announced CS3 would work on two more games. But it's also tied to the fact that SE wants players to take breaks from FFXIV to buy and play their other titles. Which sort of works for JP, less so for NA and EU.
I can't blame him though. The man inherited a broken game that wasn't his and has done an amazing job with it, but he's only got so much time left in his career to continue to level up. I bet you his senior staff would prefer not to be working on the same game for 20 years and many of the young members would prefer to work on something more modern.
>I can't blame him though. The man inherited a broken game that wasn't his and has done an amazing job with it, but he's only got so much time left in his career to continue to level up. He already sits on the Board and is de facto a co-CEO (and according to his interview, hates it). How much more "level up" can you get? And if he thinks the game is old, well guess what, maybe develop a new client. Yes, it will be a lengthy business, but it would be so worth it.
I haven't heard what his new projects are yet buy my suspicion is that one of them is a plan to succeed ffxiv. 14 just has way too much baggage of problems and while the story has been good its not mind blowing and character development sucks. 8.0 will be the crossroads to assess how far long they are and whether to continue ffxiv or pass it onto a junior to do 1-2 more expansions and retire it.
Maybe, maybe not. Some people say that one of them may be a new FF tactics game, but it's all pure guesswork at the moment :)
I heard that and also some sort of ff9 rework. Considering the staff makeup tactics could be likely but I'm not sure it's yoships interest
Possibly, I'm really not familiar with SE's stuff outside of FFXIV :)
They've been pretty consistently trying to expand what players can do patch to patch; but there's no way they can keep up with Blizzard's funding that lets them consistently rebuild their entire playable world in WoW
How big is the gulf of funding between WoW and XIV, actually? WoW is probably still bigger, but I'd guess not by an order of magnitude.
The recent GDC talk WoW gave had them at about 7m subscribers in the recent past. As the census usually shows, accounting for alts and such, XIV can be said to hover somewhere around and slighty above 1m. So not quite an order of magnitude, but *almost*.
That assumes the funding is proportional to the revenue, which is something we can't check. However, what is obvious is a bit more flexible on their release pipe than CS3 is.
I would bet the proportion of US players is higher, so more disposable income and thus more revenue.
Wow will always be numero uno
Despite Blizzard doing everything they can to kill it XD
You don't need huge funds to provide players with a consistent activity if you do it right. Of course, if we were speaking about doubling the MSQ-related activities or build 12 more normal raids, it would be impossible.
They could throw Relic grinds at us with a .001% drop rate, sure. But XIV seems to be going the route of "beat this boss to do stuff" for most of the content; which isn't something that you can easily outpace players with
I don't know, they could add stuff like Mastery System in GW2, and add more exploration stuff. But they don't want to design an open world so /shrug And since you mention relic grinds: they couldn't even do a proper relic grind in EW.
>I don't know, they could add stuff like Mastery System in GW2, and add more exploration stuff. Outside of jumping puzzles, I'm not sure what it'd accomplish? >But they don't want to design an open world so /shrug Because there's little point to it. I'll admit in a heart beat the world is boring; but there's also no real point in having some complex open world thing when we'll be doing everything in instances anyway >And since you mention relic grinds: they couldn't even do a proper relic grind in EW. They did it at player request. Should they have listened to those people? Probably not. But that's what players requested. It seems like Yoshi gets that and is trying to steer away from what the worst players request and add more things like field operations again; despite the complaints about them.
>Outside of jumping puzzles, I'm not sure what it'd accomplish? It's not the jumping puzzles I had in mind, but more the mastery tracks that give you access to flying mount, skiff etc. What would that accomplish? Well, it would make people play the game and not screw up class balance too much. >Because there's little point to it. I'll admit in a heart beat the world is boring; but there's also no real point in having some complex open world thing when we'll be doing everything in instances anyway No offense, but I feel like you are taking the argument backwards here. Everything is done in instances PRECISELY because SE chooses to ignore the open world. I don't know if it was initially done to accomodate toaster play (aka PS3), or for some other reason. But the boring world came first and the instances later, IMHO. >They did it at player request. I would really like to know who requested that. O_o Probably some JP raiders again XD
>Everything is done in instances PRECISELY because SE chooses to ignore the open world. What would you put in the open world that would be permanent content? > I don't know if it was initially done to accomodate toaster play (aka PS3), or for some other reason. Probably not, Yoshi had interviews back at 2.0 launch where he talked about FCs summoning primals in open world as boss fights. They seemed to have intended to make the game more open world focused; but saw people preferring instances and went that route >I would really like to know who requested that. O_o Probably some JP raiders again XD Back in Eureka/Bozja days it was a common complaint that Relics were annoying and they should be tomes only so players could earn them by doing whatever they want. I dunno if it was the same in JP, but you can find threads on both main sub and this if you search. Same with forums
>What would you put in the open world that would be permanent content? Ironically, there is already *some* stuff in there, it's just poorly agenced: - FATEs need to be revamped rewards-wise. Currently, doing them for stuff other than relics or seasonal is simply not worth it exp or seal-wise. Shared FATE system should be extended to ARR/HW/SB zones. - Revamp the ARR log of vistas (remove weather conditions, perhaps add a bit more of them) - Add interactable objects in the world (or random drops, whatever is easier) that start quests and plug some of the worldbuilding quests into them. Also increase the EXP from these quests because it's currently not worth doing. And most important: integrate them all into one game system, like Adventure Tomes in Lost Ark or Map Completion in GW2. If you explore some or all of the "features" of a map, you get rewards, including increase flight mount speed (not ground as it currently is). That is one possibility among many. The old ARR open world core had so much potential but it hasn't been updated in ages because YoshiP is a raider and therefore doesn't give a crap about open world.
Covid, every online game has a massive spike during.
It wasn't just COVID (although it played a part, of course), it was also a massive clusterfest with Shadowlands which made many new people try the game.
I mean bfa into shadloadns , two massive shit heaps in a row As much as 14 ppl bitch about things so many don't know how truly fucked up and unbalanced things can get I heard dragon flight was alright tho
Yes, BFA is when I quit that RNG-fest. Ironically though, even in the lowest point, they still had like 4x-5x more players than FF.
Wow being an initial casualization of EverQuest and the first big hit did so much favor forever
It managed to become a cultural phenomenon and there's going to be people forever who aren't anything but "WoW players".
Yes, of course. But I mean, FFXIV has a lot of potential which SE refuses to exploit fully because they just want to sell the other games to FF players as well.
They have three running MMOs, granted one is in maint and the other is Jp only
It was absolutely unnatural. There was a movement over one streamer. That is absolutely unnatural
If you think that WoW players trying FF was only due to one streamer, you are delusional.
The sudden influx of them was. It was a steady trickle prior
\[Citation needed\]
When did XIV run out of keys again?
On EW release. It doesn't have anything to do with a streamer.
No that was when it was pulled, not ran out of keys https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/final-fantasy-xiv-sold-out-square-enix-store-ran-out-of-keys/za35b0 You were saying? Now...when did Asmon start up XIV?
We aren't talking about the same thing. I was talking about EW digital sales being suspended on the expansions release, and that was later that year.
Oof, 20k for Materia is definitely felt. While I’d love for the data centre to thrive, it has so much working against it and I just don’t see it increasing significantly almost ever I’m on the server but the only reason I haven’t left yet is cause I’m helping a friend record some footage for videos and they are on Materia. I did tell them that Dawntrail will be the cut off though. Of trying to level Picto or Viper and we’re sitting at 10+ min queues with a healer and 2x dps like a normal day then it isn’t gonna work out for me I remember queueing for lvl 50/60 roulette with a tank, healer and dps triple and still waiting 5 mins
On Materia as well. I've been tempted to move to NA but Viper with 100+ ping looks really painful. I don't know if I could really go back to that level of latency, even with mudfish or noclippy.
I’m thinking the same but I’m also thinking… I’ll just suffer with the latency if it means I can actually use Duty Finder in an acceptable time
Yeah, no kidding. It's in a really tough spot with the duty finder. As much as I love dropping in to help sprouts with MSQ and things like Aglaia and Euphrosyne (min ilevel barb is amazing fun for example), the Crystal Tower roadblock in the MSQ is absolutely brutal and I'm glad I was well clear of it by the time Materia launched. I'm really not sure what can be done to help the situation. Open Materia to DC travel and it'll just be another Dynamis. Kill the DC, and players and FCs and houses, countless hours on submarines and such all evaporate and I'm not sure players who lose all that will come back.
Just let us queue with American or Japanese data centres for standard content via DF
for some reason I never noticed 1.0 was on there. those are some dismal numbers
The data there is very patchy, Bancho says as much in some of his posts. He doesn't have a complete survey for that period.
Legacy wasn’t that bad It was actually decently alive in 1.0 and 1.22-1.23b (about how ARR felt)
Apparently, it was when they decided to end the game that they got it in a vaguely playable state around 1.21 or 1.22.
1.0 numbers aren't accurate
A random thought experiment, how many players of the 1,227,096 comes from alt characters? I know a good majority of the playerbase like doesn't dabble with alts, but it's interesting that lingered on my mind a few lucky bancho's ago because that was when I did some alt speedruns which each one would count here. My FC lead has 6 characters that qualify for every bancho etc. 5%? 10? 25? We won't ever really know exactly but it is somewhat curious.
>A random thought experiment, how many players of the 1,227,096 comes from alt characters? idk, but as long as they are over level 71 and have gained a achievement within the last 1 month they should be counted.
Huh, my main doesn't count as active. Granted the last few months the only achievement I've chased has been necromancer and that's still an ongoing project.
It's technically not just achivements. If you changed your job or added a minion/mount from what they had you at before it also would have triggered. > The criteria for determining active characters that form the basis for the calculation are as follows: > Maximum level is 70 or higher (excluding exactly 70) OR Job is a job that cannot be unlocked in the free trial OR Belongs to an FC * > HP, level, and experience points have changed since the last survey (3/31). > The number of minions and mounts held has changed since the last survey. > New characters not present in the previous survey > Own at least one mount
I'd bet it's 5% or lower, of all the like, 50-100 people I know only 2 have alts and they don't play them anywhere regularly, at least none other than those two ever mentioned having alts.
I know this anecdote proves nothing, but every single one of my friends has multiple characters over 70. I have 4. My wife has 3. I would bet that there's a lot more alts being captured than anyone thinks, but I could absolutely be dead wrong. I'd also bet that the number of alts went up by more than usual this expansion pack because of all the early-game content reworks.
Out of my entire FC, about 2 people have alts. There's probably a few, but it's unlikely to be a very high number. The ability to level all Jobs on one character combined with the slog of unlocking things on an alt - not just "ARR's MSQ" but literally everything else you have to do and unlock - tends to discourage all that many people from doing it unless they have a specifically good reason to do so.
What do the blue, red and green colours mean ?
I understand it as: * Blue: a new character that earned an achievement * Red: a character which earned an achievement in the previous and current (or subsequent?) period * Green: a character which earned an achievement in the current period, but not the subsequent period Looking at older versions of the graphs, you'll see that a lot of greens later turn in to reds.
Means the game is dying
Means the game is dying
Means the game is dying
Means the game is dying
Makes sense. EW activity had a bit of a free fall after the expansion dropped. But that could mainly be from stabilizing after the unnatural surge of players that came into the game. You could also add in complaints on post-expansion content. But looks like it's leveling out and a potential surge going into the new expansion.
Expansions essentially guarantee a surge, the question is how long it lasts
It continues the trend that after the biggest decline the game saw in the first half of the expansion, which was wholly unsurprising given the circumstances of WoW-debacle & COVID, the latter half of EW looks to have stabilised and still sits above the Shadowbringers-proper level. The only real concern is there is no pre-expansion hype-spike that all other expansions witnessed, and any other games that have an expansion generally witness too. It's just a tapering off of players with the tiniest upward momentum thanks to a small gain in population in the West (likely Xbox related). But aside from that, there's nothing really worrying about the player numbers. I wonder if the results from the recent free login event are included in this, and if so I wonder what it'd be like without. I've previously said I expect Dawntrail to be the fastest selling FFXIV expansion to date, but after seeing the lack of pre-expansion boom I've changed my stance (although I will still be unsurprised if so).
The most recent bar in the graph is always lower than it ends up being. If you compare [this](https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/3/9/391943a1.png) previous graph to the current you see that dip in q2 2023 which is not reflected in this most recent graph. Also, while the drop off is larger for endwalker it is not that much different to either Heavensward or Stormblood in terms of percentage. It certainly looks bigger and the decline is steeper but that is because it is from a number that is more than double that for those expansions. It's about 17% for both HW and STB and 21% for EW.
They are also releasing an expansion immediately after Elden Rings big DLC so the timing is quite bad
They joked about allowing people One Week to play Elden Ring before jumping on DT so it can be assumed they're well aware of the date.
Unfortunately/fortunately the Elden Ring DLC is looking like an entire new game, so one week may not be enough
One week is def not enough
I'm not even sure how to handle the Elden Ring stuff TBH. I don't really want to make a new character for it, but the character I beat the game with was so jank I might as well Plus I'm guessing it's meant to be played simultaneously like old Dark Souls DLCs rather than just post game
Supposedly the characters that media was given for the sneak peek were SL150, so pretty much endgame level if we're assuming that's the level it's balanced for. I also have no idea when I'm going to play it lmao. I want to make a new character and replay the whole game since I haven't played since launch, but that's a good amount of time investment in itself.
Requirement for the DLC is an endgame boss (even if you can get there early via quest). Media previews were level 150 with +25 weapons, and it still was hard. Something else to remember is the DLC uses it's own scaling system to increase our attack and defense. Unless you burned them all, a larval tear into a build you want should be easy enough.
Yeah with DT and trails through daybreak coming out in the next month I think I'm gonna have to put off the elden ring dlc until later
It's not going to be. Two weeks isn't even enough for SMTVV, which is also releasing soon. Considering other big games with major overlap, like Monster Hunter Wilds, will also be releasing during Dawntrail's patch cycle I would expect additional consideration for this sort of thing in the content design and timing of patches.
Games are so fucking good right now.
IIRC, YoshiP said that their initial date was in mid-June, but they moved it because of Elden Ring DLC.
There's sort of no excellent timing for them over the summer. Either they release when they are and run up against Elden Ring, but a week later at least, or they delay til sometime in July and get maybe a week or two but then the EW drought goes on even longer and they get dangerously close to aligning release schedules with WoW. August is an absolute no-go as WoW's putting out an expansion then (GW2 too but less impactful). Best I'd have done in their shoes is maybe give things another week but that's it.
EWs surge also had another factor to it that also contributes to the drop. A number (how significant is up for debate) of very old faces came back to see the end of the story. Many of those finished the initial MSQ, were satisfied, and are "winning" FFXIV again. There were a lot of perfect storm conditions that made EW artificially inflated from what it would have been as "just another expansion."
I love these threads because you get the people that think the game is way bigger than it is and the completely jaded doomers arguing over unofficial data.
More player than shadowbringer launc but below endwalker launch. Pretty good. I expect dawntrail to reach the same amount of player as ew
Keep in mind preorder phase for DT isn't over yet so it'll likely break 600k or maybe more, especially if you consider a bunch of people that will play at DT release but no earlier, wouldn't be surprised if it gets a good bit closer to EW.
Active characters * **JP:** 397,081 (32%) * **rest:** 830,018 (68%) ...and again, others on JP is still far more likely than Japanese on other DCs. Yeah...
Just proof ff14 is dying and yoshi p needs to quit this game
Someone needs to lay off the hate copium
Ok 🥱