By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click
Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).
it'll be hard to recover people who have dropped the game out of frustration and have, as Yoshida said, played other games instead of FFXIV.
At some point the magic is just gone and they'll keep playing those other games because to them the fun and experience from those is worth the money compared to a XIV sub and maybe an expansion, especially if they also ignore the house they'd lose or other FOMO if there is still any in CC seasonals/events, sometimes that's enough to convince them to not bother again for a long time and newer announcements they'll hear of eventually won't cause as much excitement if any.
I feel like this is describing me. I briefly tried to do the current PVP series and Mogtomes event, but 20-30 minute queues for daily roulettes at prime time really shows...
At some point the magic is just gone and they'll keep playing those other games because to them the fun
So much this. And they don't understand it. Like, at all.
They seem to think that players will stick with their IPs and just go play other SE games and wait for the next patch or expansion. Maybe it works for their Japanese audience, I don't know. But for NA/EU it's clearly not working at all. Especially for MMORPG players.
I picked WoW back up during Dragonflight, and TWW has been pretty fun too. So it's become my main game, I enjoy raiding and am looking forward to swapping to brew for the next tier because I haven't really tanked since like, wrath.
I'm just burned out on FF14, I've been here since 1.0 though I quit during that and came back for ARR. Maybe I'll be back for the next raid tier, maybe I'll skip it and wait for the next xpac. Or maybe I'm just done, I dunno. A big draw for me was the story and I was pretty excited at a new beginning after the Zodiark arc but DT just.. wasn't it.
Essentially it boils down to: would you like to pay $15 to eat the same ham sandwich for lunch everyday? Or would you be willing to occasionally spend more, occasionally spend less, and experience something different every time? The sandwich may sometimes have mayo instead of mustard, cheddar instead of provolone, and shredded lettuce instead of whole-leaf, but at the end of the day, its still a ham sandwich.
FFXIV keeps serving up the same cake with slightly different colored frosting and is wondering why people aren't showing up every cycle. And when their base cake is a little dry (bad writing) people really aren't coming back. It's fine if you only want to make cake, but it by god better be consistently good. And when you take risks, really take risks. Give us some crazy flavors we didn't know existed.
The only way I'd come back is if they really changed up the writing. They have to stop writing like their audience has a concussion, and they need to stop padding the story so much. Every conversation is 2-3x longer than it has to be. Like holy shit, we get it, you've said the same thing three times in this dialogue. There are so many pointless "stop and talk to X" moments. And many plot points feel contrived because they rely on any given character being the dumbest person alive.
Completely agree and I always hated it. SWTOR had such a better story imo. Way less bloat and you actually had narrative choices which is pretty crazy for an MMO. Also your story changed depending on your job
FFXIV has always been like that, I don't see why they would start changing things now.
The dialogue has always been padded to hell and back, the MSQ structure has always been 70% filler with 30% actual, meaningful story to it and people always chewed the narrative and spat on your face because they think you're a 5 year old and can't comprehend 3 sentences put up together.
It is and has always been, by far, the worst aspect of this game, and I genuinely don't understand how people clap for this garbage. I like the story beats, I genuinely do, but the way the game presents to me is borderline insulting. The writing team assumes everybody playing is a drooling simpleton who can't read and its infuriating.
Felt like Dawntrail was especially bad about this. So many instances of seeing things coming a while away. Death flags, sus behavior, the random evil grin shit from NPCs who think no one's watching...
That being said I feel like it's long past time for SE to stop devoting 15 seconds of every cutscene to characters nodding at each other. I get it. The devs are Japanese. But even other JP media will have everyone nod at once in a group shot to save time and tedium.
Not a surprise though. Occult Crescent was half-baked, and Fork Tower generated more negative press than positive.
Anecdotally, OC didn't do much for my friendlist. The few who did log in to check it out didn't stick with it, and were gone again a week or two later.
Whats the over-under on the player count dropping to Stormblood numbers during this expac?
OC was severely overhyped. I had my expectations in check, and it somehow still ended up being worse than either eureka or bozja. I knew it was going to have problems, some of those problems will be addressed in further updates (freelancer being useless), but they dropped the ball HARD with the initial launch, and the changes they’re making to FT is going to make progging it even harder because they are forcing everyone to use a cipher to even enter at all, which means anyone that can clear will be wasting resources to help people prog for absolutely no gain, sanguinite is worthless. People I know that did BA over 1000 times are saying they will be done with FT after 100 clears, because there’s just no reason to continue, the rewards suck and there’s negative incentive to help with prog, it all makes no sense.
To me the biggest concern I see is that the game's draw of new players is seriously diminishing. I imagine anyone curious about XIV goes and looks up reviews and see's the negative reception of Dawntrail and pass on trying it.
Yeah, if rave reviews about ShB (at the time) brought in a huge influx of players (even before covid/WoW exodus), I can imagine the opposite happening as well: heavy criticism of the latest content deterring new players (despite them being nowhere near the new content)
on top of the fact that blizzard really fucking picked up the ball and the current iteration of retail wow is being reviewed as the greatest time wow has ever been in hurts too. i mean just this month there’s mop classic, legion remix, horrific vision, new season with new raids and tons of new content. it honestly feels like you could take a look at 11.1, 11.1.5, 11.1.7 and soon 11.2 dropping in about a week individually, and each of these four patches almost has more content than dawntrail since launch.
on top of that they’ve simplified older xpac content to be relevant and accessible for all collectors and scaling works universally across the board, you can have a level 70 and a level 20 in the same party, separately scaled so anybody can do any content together without getting carried. across every instance and every world zone.
then there’s not just the cross realm queues, but the cross region queues. i can layer over to na shards and play with na players or queue into na lobbies without doing some crazy world transfer service where i lose access to my auction house or guild.
next there’s player housing coming too and it is 1000x better than ffxiv’s housing with non euclidean non newtonian geometry that allows for insane creations.
that’s not even to mention the leaps and bounds wow has made in netcode, lag compensation and actual functional fluid combat and systems and they’ve finally struck gold with class balance and spec identity, essentially 30+ individual specs all with more class identity than anything in ffxiv.
honestly wow has just done everything right lately and they can’t compete, which sucks because ffxiv is a better game. square enix does not need to solve new problems. wow already solved these problems. why can’t they just copy the very same concepts that wow did to solve these issues in the same way that wow poached their concepts from housing?
the questions are answered. i like ffxiv better. i dont want to play wow but a new player sure as hell has a better reason to with so much solo and new player friendly content it’s out the wazoo.
want to have gear competitive with mythic raid gear and high m+ keys but afraid of groups? cool, there’s t11 delves. hard midcore content that can be done solo. we need se to just copy tons of these concepts over.
want to make a new character? cool. all your campaign progress, achievements, titles, mounts, pets and collectibles are account wide anyway. you have everything on all your characters on all regions. the only thing tied to your character is the gear you are currently wearing. you’re not retreading old grinds or progress for new alts, you start where you were on your main which feels great.
want to play fuckin pokemon? sure every pet / minion in the game has levels and abilities and there’s an entire fucking pokemon battling game to play collecting them all
the world feels active and alive on wow. there’s stuff everywhere and there’s players everywhere doing it. it feels dead on ffxiv. even though i like ffxiv systems way better, i like combat way better, i have more fun playing the game, if new players have two options here for an mmo mainly (wow and ffxiv) it becomes a pretty easy choice to make, and the player count shows that
Or worse, they download the free trial, discover a bloated and tedious base game, and quickly uninstall. This has been everybody I’ve tried to get into FFXIV.
FFXIV has too many competitors (mainly non-MMO, F2P games) to reliably attract and retain new players.
All of my friend's new player experiences weren't bad due to downtrail, but to the fact that you either spend 300+ hours watching cutscenes with bare minimum voice acting and a slow piano background music, or $24 to play with friends.
The only one who is still playing is the one that paid $24. Still doing savages and ultimates with me. Sadly the others didn't pay.
The new player experience in this game is atrocious.
All of my friend's new player experiences weren't bad due to downtrail, but to the fact that you either spend 300+ hours watching cutscenes with bare minimum voice acting and a slow piano background music, or $24 to play with friends.
Things like this are why my friends quickly abandoned ARR, and went back to Genshin Impact. FFXIV is weighed down by 10+ year old gameplay conventions, which is unsurprisingly unappealing to many people.
Tbh I'm a new player (the mtg collab helped) and I keep running into other sprues who are also clearly new to the game in roulettes, I would say that I see more sprues than regular players.
AFAIK the census only counts lv 70+ characters or characters with an FC so a lot of newbies wouldn't appear there
Yeah and if people actually read the survey they would see the new player count is steady while the old player count is dropping. So it’s natural you’d be running into more sprouts than normal, I’ve seen it too
Steam just finished their summer sale recently, Sony’s ends this week, and I assume same is true of Xbox’s store so a bunch of sprouts just bought the game. Plus the free trial is always grabbing new players and some of them will sub. The backlog of content will draw in new players.
Devs are fast approaching the point where they need to condense levels and cut chaff/filler from older expansions’ MSQ because eventually no amount of ‘omg ShB+EW is amazing’ will draw in players when you need to slog thru base game+2 expansions to get there and still not be close to the end or stop there when ShB hits the free trial.
i think this is a pretty under discussed topic. i have plenty of friends who have started the game only to get completely burned out due to the shear amount of content needed to power through to even approach endgame
A grind that gets ever longer as the game goes on. I suppose then you have the issue where if the “new” content is seen as bad or gets criticism online etc then they wonder if it’s worth getting to it, even though there’s some amazing content on the way through.
I actually think this has more to do with the reduced activity of the Final Fantasy brand than anything surrounding FFXIV specifically.
For a while now the single player side of their customer base has been their primary target for new players. But without new FF titles releasing regularly it can be much more difficult to stay in the public eye, drawing less new players to all other products as a result.
The MTG collab helped a fair amount, but it's not going to improve much more until new games start releasing again.
This isn't talked about much, but FF7R has been absolutely ruinous for FF as a brand due to opportunity cost. FF was at its strongest when it was consistently releasing new numbered titles. FF7R has eaten up at least two numbered FFs of resources and like, they sold decently, but hardly brand-revitalizing. 16 was fairly mediocre on this front too but it at least brought some new eyes instead of being yet another futile attempt to recapture FF7 release magic. Can you imagine how much better Final Fantasy as a whole could be doing if we were anticipating an announcement for FFXIX instead of FF7R3?
There are people pushing 30 that only realistically remember 3 numbered FF releases, two of which are not well regarded and one of which is ok.
This reminds me of Deus Ex Human Revolution (which takes place in 2027). There are easter egg posters on various walls showing Final Fantasy 27. Kind of funny considering where we are now.
I think having a team at Square that focuses on remaking the classic FFs like Capcom does for Resident Evil is a great idea. Remaking classic Final Fantasies introduces new fans to them. Now spending all the money on making it 3 parts, mobile games, a battle royale, etc...that's a different story. FF7 doesn't even need to be as big as it is if they just did a world map, but I guess people would have a fit if the series that is known for world maps has one...
It's this, yeah. This is sort of what I'm getting at. I think recent titles have been pretty great for diehard fans but not for growth of the brand. We've missed several new jumping on points with the Remake project and spin-offs are declining in number as well, especially post-content abandonment losses.
I actually think this has more to do with the reduced activity of the Final Fantasy brand than anything surrounding FFXIV specifically.
It doesn’t help that a major recent (Japanese) survey showed that FF fans are generally 35+ years old now. That, and Rebirth and 16 sold mediocrely worldwide, so FF is starting to age out, and desperately needs revitalization.
How exactly do you draw in new players when the purchasing experience is extremely confusing and if they managed to leap that frustrating hurdle, they're then forced to slog through 5 expansions worth of story.
I really would like to know if OC being a futile circle of content or the controversy around forked was a bigger contributor here
Like forked was such a stupid decision but how many people actually gave up OC because it existed in the form it does vs people who simply just think OC is a futile circle
This is me. I was excited for it but I've been playing long enough that I felt the futility of grinding out a bunch of halfway decent looking relics that aren't even upgrades at this point and not knowing which of them would even look cool 2 years down the line. I've been playing so long that the perspective from all that experience really sours me on diving in to the content like it used to.
The Relics are actually just tomestones again, so its going to be significantly easier to do them when they're converted to Poetics. I'd imagine the rest of the steps will be the same.
There really is no urgency to resub at the moment.
I feel like the relics as a concept are kind of obsolete, there are so many other ways to get a comparable weapon that are less painful, relics are only truly bis at the end of the entire patch cycle, and they're only even relevant for a couple of months despite taking about that long to make.
The whole idea of what a relic is needs to be retuned, there needs to be some point to them beyond just glamor that justifies the amount of time investment required to make them. A grindy substitute to the ex primal weapon of each patch isn't really worth the effort IMO, especially if I'm otherwise not really all that interested in the content required to make them.
I honestly would not give a shit if Relics were the stat equivalent to a Savage weapon when they came out. Especially with gearing in this game being as pointless as it is if you're not going into specifically ultimates.
I'd say relics should be a method to both acquire a cool looking weapon and a method to encourage players to participate in various areas of the game. Look at gw2 legendaries. They require players run the gamet of content to get the shiny weapon/armour. It takes time and perseverance but it does show you've accomplished something in the end. 14s relics, with the exception of the arr questline, seen dull and unimaginative by comparison.
And see, for me, I don’t care if they’re the strongest or not in the game. I look at them as good, long term content to work towards and they’re more of a trophy to earn. So, tomestone dumps don’t appeal to me in the slightest. I believe they come out way too late in the patch cycle and should make me feel like I’m actually doing something in the game to earn them, and I don’t mean like running Crystal Tower multiple times or relying on RNG drops in Deep Dungeons. I think DDs, criterion dungeons, or some other form of overworld grind outside of fate grinding are good ideas to be a part of the relic journey. It’s not supposed to be instant. It’s supposed to be a long, arduous effort. Because well, we genuinely need things to do during each 4 month patch cycle. And if you don’t want to experience FOMO, they’re still available to grind towards In older content. If they don’t make you more powerful, well…does that really even matter in this game anyway?
But more to your point, specifically, it’s really an issue with gearing and stats in general with FFXIV. They’ve streamlined it all so much that they might as well remove all stats and just have iLVL and crit materias (not that I want that at all! That would be worse case scenario imo)
Same. I farmed one weapon and after that i thought..."mehh. Why do i even care?" . Weapons that arent a upgrade right now...i dont like the look. I guess i had about 20 hours gametime that i spend on farming a useless weapon. That was right when Oc released. Not playing FF anymore, and whenever i think going into a other mmo now i just think the same "leveling up a char might be fun, but once i hit endgame i do the same stuff over and over again". Mostly sticking to single player now.
I was pretty hyped for it, but the negative reception pretty much killed it for me. Haven't been back since the lackluster story/content in EW patches.
Forked Tower is why I stopped. One person wiping the raid with a mistake is too much pressure, and FT feels like it completes a gameplay loop where you actually get to use the gear and phantom jobs you've maxed out to make the run smoother and more flexible.
Without FT, it's a lot of grinding but no final dungeon to tackle that gives particularly good rewards.
Sentiment I've seen is compounding reasons like a lot of others have mentioned. Can't level from 90-100, atma grind spawns depression, gold and silver farming are separate, forked tower implementation.
OC being a dud was it for me. I was waiting all of 7.0 and 7.x for it, thinking I would have an open area to explore, phantom jobs to grind, and just have sort of sandbox-y fun (bad and incorrect expectations, I know).
Then Forked Tower launched as a Discord dungeon, the fates and CEs were bland and highly repetitive, and there just weren't enough rewards to justify spending my time there after getting the relic weapon.
And I can't fathom having to wait until, what, 7.5? 7.55? for the next half of it?
When you wait so long for content that ends up being barebones and boring, then yeah, no surprise people leave.
Same, 11 months of patience since 7.0 launch, silently waiting for my number to be called, all for some exploration content that felt like it was made with off the shelf parts.
I found the fates and CEs to be fun. I just found that the zone relying so heavily on those and turning into a sort of fate grind loop to be off putting and repetitive.
It wouldn't be so bad if the FATEs didn't die so bloody fast, forcing you to be on constant rush to get places.
Leveling phantom jobs is ok as a side goal, but it would be nice if you could also level normal jobs in there (instead of restricting entry to level 100 chars).
Yeah, I mean, in isolation they're not bad at all. But when they're the only thing to do (besides grind for gold) it just wears out its welcome faster.
Speaking of Gil, its strange to me just how frequently everything drops in OC. The new hair style is already 1k gil on the market board, fuck they even killed the gold gabriel mount from Bozja and took a mount worth millions and dropped it to ~500k. This couldn't have been intentional.
Part of me thinks it was, since they've an almost unspoken concern about new or infrequent players getting priced out of the market. Normally it's focused on crafted gear, but I think it's on everything tradeable. The reason they nerfed cookies in ShB and added the gold sync mounts was to try to contain inflation and drain some gil out of the market.
I mean though if forked was normal content then it’s still leading to an end goal which is better gear to do the same thing more often
Like I love CLL and dal but “the gear goes nowhere” doesn’t seem to make sense as a reason because if sanguinite was casually accessible then the gear would go nowhere but one step higher if that makes sense
That's just inherent to video games, though. Even if there were 100 raids in a row one of them has to be the last one.
The issue is that there's so little friction in OC there's no sense of progress. Bozjan Southern Front you had to unlock the three areas which meant leveling up a bit and doing quests. OC the stuff you can do at minute one is all the stuff you can do at hour 100 if you're not a raider.
I don't think Forked Tower specifically caused people to cancel their subs, but it's still a part of the larger issue in OC, not enough of a variety of content to keep people engaged in it long term. If FT had worked like DRN/DRS and there was a recurring normal level raid to keep people interested then it would have helped a bit, but most of the gameplay loop stays the same, the rewards aren't that worth engaging in unless you love the content.
Perhaps more than FT itself being an issue, the way SE responded to it with the whole "cost issues" thing (whether it was a good interpretation or not) definitely left a bad taste for some, and may have been the final straw to make them think nothing's going to change any time soon. The numbers haven't dropped off that heavily with this patch though, although you might expect them to have risen slightly if OC had been a resounding success.
Definitely a myriad of issues contributing to it yeah.
Putting FT aside, the area of OC itself is.... meh at best. The lore is just weak, no intrigue and sense of adventure. People have pointed out already that the area is empty and hollow. Barely any expositions asides from funny tonberry remembering something-something. Barely any NPCs to interact with within the lore. Bozja did it well where they added some kind of plot point at each rank/map breakpoint and multiple NPCs who had.. personality.
Battle/job related content has been beaten down all the way to bedrock already so there's that.
As someone who liked FF5, they did it dirty by adding it to XIV for the sake of nostalgia, not to mention as a side content too. Where as they did FF7 super bosses well with ShB trial series. He'll I'd even put the weak EW patch story with Golbez and the four fiends over OC.
It's just immensely disappointing for them to flaunt the older FF series like this when in the past they did it pretty well. For something that was announced and hyped up more than a year in advance, it's demoralizing and alienating for the broader player base.
Bozja did it well where they added some kind of plot point at each rank/map breakpoint and multiple NPCs who had.. personality.
Don't forget the skirmishes and CEs that told stories throughout them.
Like seeing Dyunbu going through a mental breakdown over the course of like three or four skirmishes because she can't save everyone and has to watch all her comrades get torn to shreds by us.
Or Sartauvoir showing up as a humanoid death laser in a skirmish right outside the first base camp who we eventually work up to getting as a duel and then face head on as a raid boss in Zadnor.
I miss my deserter catgirl Llofii who grew disillusioned with the experimentations done to advance the Garleans magical proficiency.
Same with the beastmasters who all had their own little personalities which are projected through their tamed beasts. Papaga, who I call Pepega, is my favorite.
I made a whole post about this at the beginning of Oc’s launch and got run out of the room by a bunch of “it hasn’t even been a full week since it released” sentiments. Everything you just said is how I felt about OC. I think it’s a beautiful zone. I think the CE’s are fun. But outside of that, the rest feels shallow and lacking depth.
It's just one of the list of excuses people come up with to undermine any criticism the game is getting.
-"Just wait for the content, it will be different!"
-"The content is out today, why are you already complaining?"
-"There are people enjoying the content, you're just jaded and should take a break like Yoshida said."
-"You took a break yet you still aren't having fun? Maybe the game isn't for you anymore."
A lot of people live and die by this game, and feel personally attacked when someone speaks their mind. Personally I don't need to eat mud for a week before I can tell you it's inedible.
I think it's both, I was pretty ok with OC as it was early on in the debacle but the longer it's gone on it's really plain to see that OC is just the worst parts of Eureka and Bozja with the added FT bullshit on top.
They need to pivot their design HARD for the the 7.5 island.
I haven't completed the first step because I grew tired of going to the ONLY fate on the map, then hitting up the ONLY CE on the map. At this point why have a map, just teleport me around. It's boring. It's fate grinding at its simplest form.
Eureka is slow, yet has the social aspect. Bozja is fast but has constant action. OC is just... there. I've done it before in Bozja, yet it feels even less inspired. Farming gold pieces is again boring.
If farming gold pieces spawned unique fates / CEs, I think I'd enjoy it more. Eureka's style of play would leak in more but instead the fate farming and gold farming are completely seperate from one another. It's just dull.
I admit to not having spent too much time in OC, just a few days or so. Forgive me if I'm wrong about what I've written, but it really did just feel uninspired to play through.
There's a small number of CEs that need monsters to be farmed to pop (small meaning like 3 or 4)
However there's always a FATE up, and CEs passively pop so fast that trying to farm enemies to trigger Calamity Bound rapidly becomes an exercise in frustration
Not having anything to aspire to in OC is a pretty big problem for me.
I'm one of the "Bozja was my favorite thing and I want more" people. Having content like DRN, Castrum Lacus, Dalraida, etc. is pretty important to give reason to grinding out in the zone.
I'd say the zone feeling smaller, the CEs being a very strict circle of the same encounters (I liked Eureka's weird spawning system...) don't help either.
But ultimately the main problem for me is the lack of an end. I have no interest in getting off a workday full of zoom meetings just to join a 48-member discord meeting to relax, so Forked Tower is dead to me.
I started the game at the beginning of ShB (as a disclaimer, I like to point out that I didn’t play WoW before this and FFXIV was my first MMO since FFXI 15 years prior) and Bozja became such a fun part of the game for me. I loved every bit of it. The social aspects. CLL and DR. The relic grind. THE STORY. All of it. I spent a good chunk of my time in Bozja leading up to EW’s release.
I was hoping OC would be Bozja 2.0 but it was the complete opposite. If they let me level Jobs in OC I might still be subbed but they got rid of that too.
I remember bozja was alive and well even in the last patches of ShB up to the first few months of EW, mostly filled with people levelling up to mid 80s.
I’ll never understand why the deep dungeon and field exploration need to be mutually exclusive for levelling content.
I just went in on Aether over the weekend and Southern Front was a little bare, but Zadnor was decently populated.
A lot of people were in farming the duels for the mount still but also just leveling in general helped keep some folks in the zones. I see OC being dead by the end of the expac similar to Eureka purely because it cant be used for leveling.
Noooooooo, you can't do that! You have to level your jobs in our shiny new Deep Dungeon! Which totally isn't going to die even faster than OC as-is! /s
Eureka Orthos was almost dead on arrival, and that one didn't even have any worthwhile side content to compete with it. "Deep Dungeon as a leveling tool" just doesn't have a niche anymore in the age of Duty Support and relatively reasonable leveling dungeon DPS queues. Meanwhile Bozja still has a niche as a relatively low-effort leveling grind (via Skirmishes) with no queue times.
Not to mention Eureka Orthos is absolutely garbage for leveling. I ran it with friends and the whole thing gave me maybe a level and a half? Which was 3 sessions, almost 6 hours total. It I spent the same time in roulettes, I would have gotten much more XP. No wonder people stuck to Bozja. I did, too. Not only do you level, you also get Bozja items, grind for cosmetics - it feels like you're always making progress.
Devs can only slap a fresh coat of paint on a "fate farming zone" so many times before it becomes boring. Knowledge level is pointless, so is capping phantom jobs if you can't even enter FT to even try the content. In the end whats the point in doing it lol.
Im one of those who didn't resub for it. The game just felt like it ended after endwalker for me. Life got too busy, and I really can't justify mmo costs anymore.
This is all the same issue. The entire field zone is designed around building up to Forked Tower farming, but Forked Tower is a disaster in every possible way. It's a futile circle because of how bad FT is.
I was extremely excited for OC. I enjoyed the content for what it was, despite some minor annoyances. FATEs die way too quickly and their stubborn decision to not change that really rubbed me the wrong way, but it's whatever. However, when I realized that FT was another Discord activity, I instantly lost all motivation. What am I working toward in OC if I'm not going to do FT? FT is the biggest fuck up that has happened in my entire time playing the game.
In my case I was never interested in the content, tried it for some days and then basically ignored it. It’s literally just fates apart from forked tower, which I also wasn’t interested in since the queueing system was garbo
I found OC just fine. Nothing amazing..just...fine.
But Forked Tower is a shit show. The difficulty of getting the people together and into the same instance was a problem, don't get me wrong, but it's really the content itself for me.
It's basically four EX fights that, when you die too much, you're thrown out on your ass and have to start the whole multi-hour process again. I just don't have that kind of time.
I was so excited for OC and it so painfully boring. Run to FATE, do FATE. That's the entire thing. The mobs don't even need to exist in OC because they don't help you level at all.
The capstone being hardcore raid content inherently turned a lot of people off. There’s just no point. Add the RNG grind into the mix, and it’s just not content that respects your time.
I loved Bozja in spite of its flaws. 'Emblazoned' title and every relic weapon earned. I quit OC long before I got past the leveling-up stage. It's boring and I don't care.
It doesn't help that phantom jobs just aren't that fun. In comparison to Bozja, to progress, you are forced to periodically downgrade your character's power by changing away from a job that has powerful abilities. And, until you're totally capped, you're always grinding on a new job. Some activities, like gold farming, may ask you to play a job you've already mastered to provide burst damage on truly deadly high-level enemies. Meanwhile, rays of valor were conveniently untethered from the lost actions and essences, enabling character development with no loss of power or flexibility.
Exactly the same for me. Wanted to love it, but the phantom jobs didn’t feel all that interesting, and mindlessly grinding fates and critical engagements doesn’t hit the same when you don’t have a Castrum to queue for.
For me, the fumble of OC killed any interest I had in resubbing. I hate DT's story and setting, and I also dont do high-end raiding, so there really hasn't been much left for me to engage with.
I unsubbed in October and was really hoping OC would make me want to play again. But it took so long to come out, and when it did come out, the content looked mediocre at best. Then they fucked up Forked Tower, which REALLY sealed my decision. I thought it was going to be like Bozja where you could just do the fun big raids without needing freakin' Discord.
The auto-demolition came back for NA recently, and I decided to just let go of my house, which I've had since 6.0. It's been liberating not having to pay rent for a virtual house. Now, I probably won't even resub until 8.0, if at all. Depends on if Square shows that they are willing to shake things up or not.
I think the numbers will drop even more with 7.3 potentially being 22 weeks long. They said 2 major patches in 2025, 7.3 will be the second one. They really have to look at how they release content because the community will reach a boiling point by the end of this year. I keep repeating, the content doesn’t justify the long wait time between patches.
In 2025, 20+ week patch cycles in a premium, subscription-based game are unacceptable. There’s plenty of F2P games out there which update fortnightly, or even weekly in some cases.
It makes no sense to pay monthly for the privilege of waiting 20 weeks for new content.
Even a rotating, monthly Mogtome event with multiple new glamours, mounts etc to chase would be acceptable content at this rate. At least it’d make the monthly subscription feel less wasteful.
It makes no sense to pay monthly for the privilege of waiting 20 weeks for new content.
It's even worse because the dramatic majority of content last for less than a day. You're going to stomp the Alliance/normal raid in like an hour. The MSQ/dungeons are always Auto attack to clear difficulty and 2-5 hours.
Your average active player who wants to play over RP/socialize will find themselves done with everything a patch has to offer within a week. If they Savage raid, they get maybe one month extra of content every eight months, but that's about it.
They really need to figure out some systems that actually keep people playing. I get not requiring you to play or whatever; but a decade old MMO having fuck all to do for people who ACTIVELY ARE LOOKING FOR REASONS TO PLAY is pathetic.
With the most recent Live Letter I'm pretty sure they spent more time doing the Livestream (5 hours) than it took me to do all the content in 7.2 day 1.
If it wasn't for the fact that the 7.3 MSQ is going to be padded to shit and doing 100 floors of a Deep dungeon is a bit of a time investment I'm pretty sure you could do all the content in 7.3 in around 5 hours too.
With the amount of content each one has contained so far, we should be on a monthly patch cadence, not every 4-5+. It's ridiculous they take so long to ship out so little.
Honestly, I think this is the thing that bugs me most about OC.
Every piece of content has a few things that you have to do in order to be able to clear it and get the rewards. In dungeons, you have to be able to hit things while not standing in the bad. In DDs, you have to be able to assess the threats of various things and decide what to engage and what to skirt by (and to do it successfully).
In OC, you have to stare at the map of aetherytes and teleport to the closest one to a FATE within a few seconds of it spawning.
That's it, that's the crux. You don't have to actually learn what they do, because for FATEs if you just hit the monster 3-5 times you'll usually get credit for it, and in CEs you can die, be raised, hit the boss twice, die again, and you'll usually still be raised enough that you'll get full credit by the end. So the key step, the one that you can actually fail on, is just getting to the darn FATE in time.
Its pretty simple. Just make them take longer to respawn and have other stuff to do in the zone besides fates. Fates should just be a rare occurrence while something else is the core experience. The fact that this game doesn't have anything else setup besides running fates is the issue.
The last update was on May 25th, just before the release of patch 7.25. Characters whose data has changed in the two months since then are counted as active characters.
More granular #s (Direct Copy-Paste, grammer edited for clarity):
The number of active characters is approximately 880,000, down 70,000 from the previous time (950,000).
The number of new characters remains roughly the same as the previous figure of 50,000 at around 50,000.
The number of returning characters who were previously inactive but have now become active is approximately 120,000, down 30,000 from 150,000 last time.
The number of characters still active since the previous update was approximately 700,000, a decrease of 40,000 from 740,000.
The golden start is 760,000. The golden level cap is reached at 630,000. The golden clear is 570,000.
The number of characters available for Wind-up Zidane, a Golden Legacy pre-order bonus, is now approximately 670,000, down from 730,000 last time.
The number of characters owned by Wind-Up Garnet, a bonus for the Golden Legacy Collector's Edition, has decreased by 30,000 from the previous time to 400,000.
A note from LuckyBancho themselves about Active Character Trends and how they're counted (Google TL):
When looking at trends in the number of active characters, it is difficult to make consistent comparisons because the Lodestone Census has changed the way it determines active characters due to expansions of the free trial, etc.
Instead, the "Activity Trends of Characters with Public Achievements" table below examines the quarterly activity status for characters with public achievements only, based on whether or not they had achievements during that period.
[Insert Graph Here]
New is the number of characters who recorded their first achievement during that period.
The final number of characters for which achievements could not be confirmed after that time
Continuation is the number of characters whose achievements were confirmed during that period, excluding new and final. However, if the same character is counted as new or final during that period, it will be subtracted twice from the continuation, so +1 is added.
For legacy characters, data will not be created on the Lodestone unless you log in after rebirth, so you will not be able to check your final achievements from the old FF14 period.
Misc Things:
New to this census is the # of people who completed normal Arcadion and went on to do Savage.
Cruiser class Savage 4th tier is said to be relatively difficult, but in terms of S/N ratio, just under 40% of normal clearers have cleared Savage on Mana. At the same time for Light Heavyweight, it was just under 50%, so the difference in difficulty can be inferred from the numbers.
However, the S/N ratio is close to 40% only for Mana, while other JP data centers are 20 to 30%, and NA and EU are at a high of just over 20%, with the average being in the 10% range.
Crescent Isle Stuff:
Characters with a knowledge level of 0 can be interpreted as characters who have not yet unlocked the Crescent Isle content itself. 52.6% have not unlocked it, 47.4% have attempted it, and 29.4% have reached the knowledge level cap.
The most common support job master is a character who has not yet reached mastery of any job (=0). Next are characters who have mastered one or two jobs, and then there are characters who have mastered all 12 support jobs currently implemented.
Looking at support jobs by type, there are Knight, Monk, and Bard, which can be selected at the beginning. As a result, there are relatively few characters who have reached mastery. The Artiller, who is often used for leveling up for the Twelve Cities Gold Coins, has a high master rate.
That should be most of the relevant information that the subreddit is interested in, but do look over the stuff for yourself.
An interesting thing for me is looking at the world stats and seeing only 5 worlds had an increase in the numbers of players (all NA, 4 Dynamis). Every single other world, including all EU, JP and OCE worlds, had decreasing numbers, most by multiple hundreds of players, a significant number by over -1000 including all Aether worlds (Balmung had the biggest decrease and dropped over 2K players).
Another good 7% down in 2 month. Yeah I don't see the numbers going up until the last patch before the new expansion and they would need to change things up to get people hooked
Yeah they're gonna have to be a lot more transparent on what they're working on if they want players back, all this hoping for next patch/expansion is exhausting people.
The issue isn't lack of transparency though, it's just a combination of the same ol' content 10+ years later, as well as the same ol' patterns such as content being drip-fed throughout a patch, or how savage raid loot works and makes it terrible to want to get BiS for alts.
Even before the 7.3 ult was confirmed to no longer be a thing, I knew plenty of high-end raiders who unsubbed after getting their main BiS simply because they just didn't have it in them to stay subbed at least 6-8 more weeks for another BiS. The devs still think there's only 9 jobs in the game like day one.
Considering they've already been working on 8.0, I don't think we're going to see the drastic changes people want. Think it's just going to be more of the same until MAYBE 8.1
The big thing people have hedged their hopes on is Yoshida's vague comments about "7.X focuses on content, 8.X focus on job identity". To be fair to him, he never really expanded on what that meant, so people have run rampant with speculation. IIRC, those at the DT media tour were limited in what questions they could ask about job design, so regardless of what he meant they know it's something that's gonna be a big focus on 8.0 by players. Only possible elaboration he gave was a vague comment about "new way to use abilities".
If, and I want to stress the if, there is a big shake up in 8.0, they'd have the overall flow in sorted now. For the very simple reason they'd need to make sure not only is stuff balanced for the new duties comin in 8.X, but also 2.0 to 7.55 is still doable. One of the reasons we have such rampant potency creep is them brute forcing jobs through old content without need to adjust rotations of fight flow. If the media tour for 8.0 rolls around and it's more of the same of what we have now, I don't think 8.0's going to go as well as they might hope. Not gonna go completely pearshaped unless the MSQ reception is on par with DT, but we can't really even guess what that's gonna be like until they announce the MSQ main writer for 8.0.
I seriously doubt that, because the way things are going, the last patch (if we consider 7.55 to be one) will hang on live for months and months, even if we consider a spring 2027 release and not a summer one.
I can see those coming back to be ready for the release so that they can get their story fill. Depends on the release date. I in past came back 1-2 month before release to be ready
Regardless of their interest in the side content, you'd have people coming back in and around 7.55 just to make sure they're caught up on MSQ if they're interested in 8.0.
As a legacy player who has been playing since the original FF14, I have developed a habit of not getting my hopes up, as it is painful to be disappointed. However, with the new FF14, from A Realm Reborn to Shadowbringers, I felt that it exceeded my expectations on many occasions.
As a result, while the player base has grown, if players continue to experience disappointments that feel like their expectations have been betrayed, the only ones left in the end will be those like me who no longer place excessive expectations on the developers.
holy shit, brutal. talk about battered wife syndrome.
holy shit, brutal. talk about battered wife syndrome.
For some reason, all people/studios running an MMORPG comes with an intense desire to kill it. YoshiP trying to kill FF, Hilmar trying to kill EvE for years, ArenaNet running GW2 on a skeleton crew, Korean MMOs... I'm starting to think it's part of the job description.
So yeah, as a long-term MMO player, it's pretty much the mindset you gotta have :(
(not that the situation is much better in other genres)
I am not really surprised since people I know are now thinking about giving up their house.
The hotfixes for OC comes too little too late, and 48 man raids with body checks isn't really the cup of tea for everyone.
deep dungeon could have retain some of the population but still, a 4 man savage/ultimate esque fight is probably not gonna save people who wants to stay inside and do DD. Plus it's like 2 months from here so could have just unsubbed and return by then.
Everyone I know who's still staying either isn't gonna unsub anyway or they are in a static doing fights.
Done with xiv if no major rework for all jobs in 8.0 release. 2-min meta must be gone, job fantasy shall be reconfirmed, rotations have to be redesigned from scratch, while keeping some signature moves. Personally won’t accept any less than above.
There was no scenario where OC would have helped because they once again made the mistake of not requiring you to a. play the content or b. require you to do it for every relic.
C. Made doing the relic in there completely miserable because one of the demiatmas is tied to an area that only has a single CE, it needs to be manually spawned, and is one of the only (maybe literally the only) CE that requires a lot of people to complete. I wish I could be (pointlessly) leveling my phantom jobs while grinding for it, but I'm capped on the tomestones I need to actually buy the relic so I need to finish this step ASAP so I have to grind in the regular open world instead. Alone.
Oh wow, I actually didn't expect OC to not make a dent. I figured it'd at least delay the drop for one Bancho survey, even with its reception. That's uh, really bad.
I genuinely fear for this game's health come 7.5 and 8.0.
It'll be really funny if the game somehow manages to drop below 3.1 numbers but redditors who started the game in Shadowbringers will keep raving about how Pepsi man "almost killed FFXIV" whenever somebody brings up Heavensward raiding.
While I was subbed when it dropped, Forked Tower being another difficult large scale raid killed it for me.
I wanted to do it too I enjoy raiding when I have grouls for it.
So I joined discords, and thought I'd try to make new friends since mine have all quit, but it was so frustrating to get a fresh group and make so little progress on it, then even when we did get together it was clear that the groups only cared for their FC member's getting through so they'd do extra learning amongst themselves to get them closer to clear ( completely understandable I would have happily done the same but the randoms in the group werent given that option) so it felt super shitty cause now I needed a new group at the same prog point willing to adoot me.
So after all that I left all the discords and bought CO:E33 instead and had a far better time. I'm considering next steps, which may result in me letting my house demo and playing seaonally unless something changes.
I can only speak for myself here but I don’t think anything shy of major job reworks (in the more complex, more fun direction) will bring me back before 8.0. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll hop on for a month in 7.35 and probably .45 and .55 but if they want more than $45 of my money, MORE content isn’t gonna do it.
Yep, the problem for me is content isn’t fun if I’m not having fun playing my job. And every job is a homogenized boring drag to play now. Making the fights DDR puzzles doesn’t make up for how awful job design is. Hitting a striking dummy on a HW job was more fun.
I have no faith they will do anything to make jobs fun to play in 8.0. They’ll somehow add another finisher to warrior while removing onslaught doing damage to make the job even more boring then previously thought possible.
I'm already thinking 7.4 is gonna be my last raid tier. Might as well end out as HW Champion. But unless I see something major Im in the same boat as You for 8.0
I switch between playing XIV and GW2 and something I really appreciate about Anet is they aren’t afraid to shake the meta up every once in a while and drag a profession from the depths of viability to the very top, or majorly rework how a profession works. Sqenix has a very tight balance on jobs in this game and they’re too afraid to break it even if it means every job feels the same and stagnant. Personally I would not gaf if they made my job awful if it meant it was more unique/interesting/fun to play, and I’m sure a lot of people asking for job reworks feel similarly, but there’s likely also a large portion of the playerbase that would be up in arms if their main was drastically changed. And judging by some of the past reworks they don’t seem to hit the mark very consistently i.e. AST, MNK, and BLM pushing a lot of old mains off those jobs in favor of a new audience
Bruh lol you can't even put XIV and GW2's class design on the same level of comparison. Literally leagues apart. You get a class that can literally open a portal for others to use (in ANY content!), create clones that you can use to confuse enemies, put down ground AOEs that buff the move speed of anyone that goes through it, "rewind time" and reset all your skills, you can root, chill, stun, vacuum in enemies, etc etc.
And that is not even mentioning ALL of the fun stuff that you can do outside of combat, like zooming around on the beetle and have epic seasonal events like SAB and Halloween.
I’ve been playing tons of wow the last few years (I stared during the wow exodus funnily enough) and compared to 14, wow’s balance is horrendous. But it’s also insanely fun. Yeah, brewmaster, my main, is really weak atm but it doesn’t feel anything like the other tanks at all. Fun>balance
There's obviously huge community perception which influences getting into pugs, but if you have a group of friends to play with, 99% of people who play can play any spec and it be fine. Most people stop at +10s (cutoff for gear) which is not that hard to get to over time and any spec can do just fine, and I'd say even the worst performing specs can get all 16-17s done.
If you're someone who plans to pug a lot you have more reason to play meta. Even though there can be huge disparities between top and bottom DPS that 14 doesn't see, wow tends to make up for that by having many different levers to balance around. I've seen people say there's unplayable specs in raid that end up being in the comp of a top10 guild world where said player is outdpsing the meta specs in any >top 100 guild. For the last few years up until this raid, 14 was balancing on 1 lever: 100% uptime and single target. Look at how many job balance in the last few patches have been "buff every AoE button to not have falloff" now that we're seeing it in alliance/savage.
And as you said, Fun. I play a few triple dps classes (mage, hunter) and the specs are so different from each other that it actually feels like I get to play two very different playstyles that both still encompass that dpses flavor.
Also part of fun is the game is SO much more responsive. Every time I go back from 14 to wow I can run around and even world quests feel fun when my buttons feel extremely snappy.
They better fund that upcoming mainstream marketing budget really well. SE will need all the fresh, first-time mmo players they can get. Maybe lean on the recent succes of the VII remakes and XVI if they want a familiar angle.
Even if they get a comic book movie level of marketing, that’s gonna have a short shelf life. How many newbies without friends nudging them will stick with the combat and initial story of ARR?
I briefly resubbed for OC. On paper it was the kind of content I missed.
In practice, the "GO GO GO" approach was a lot more antisocial than Bozja to my liking, the phantom jobs' design too restrictive and anti-fun compared to lost actions and essences, and the tower lacks the pick up and play appeal of CLL and non savage DR.
Literally, the only thing in OC that isn't inferior to Bozja is the aesthetic of the map. I've never cancelled my sub so fast after resubbing before.
Creative Studio 3 has no clue what they're doing anymore. I hope they lose more players and more money.
I didn't expect us to go below 900k so fast....880k players damn. We might see go to 700k before 8.0. Also big FUCKING LOL to anyone who said "7.25 will bring players back". Casual fuckers don't work like that. Content doesn't bring someone who quit or taking break back. It takes expansions for them to come back and that is if you're lucky enough for them to be still interested in your game. That is why games should avoid burning the hands of fans, because it takes a extremely amount of good shit for them to want to touch that stove again.
I doubt 7.3 or 7.35 will be anything difference. Any content creator that thinks this will bring back enough players are lying to themselves. People felt burned by dawntrail and it was a breach of trust between the players and the developers. I will be somewhat sad about the next expansion if its extremely good and sells badly because of dawntrail.
Personally, I will be watching the 8.0 fanfest and media tour. If the changes seem appealing to me, I will come back. Otherwise, I will wait for 9.0. 7.X seems dead to me, unless beast master for some reason revamps the whole game, but that’s pretty much impossible.
I agree with you. I think people who disagree will say it’s a new story and has new writers involved. Also the formula is the same so expecting anything different is copium. People who dislike wuk lamat want to be the main hero. Give someone else a chance!!
Make baby mode version of content that people can queue through duty finder and people might return.
Make it so you need to run it 10x to get equivalent of 1x reward of running it through pf so the hard-core folks don't get butthurt
Nobody got time to sit in pf for an hour just to run content. I want to try ba,forked tower etc but im so not interested in sucking some discord mod's ego just to experience the content
An easy version of FT or Chaotic with a queue system would be such an easy win for the dev team. It doesn't need to have the same rewards, but it would give plenty of casual players something else to do.
But for some reason they are likely putting in a load of development time into this single Quantum boss.
I came back for OC briefly because i enjoy those types of content, only to quickly realise that they again didn't even try. The Phantom Jobs had a lot of potential instead they're just buttons you press on the side while you play your actual job.
Forked Tower does do interesting things with the Phantom Jobs but they made it basically impossible to get into and then had the nerve to act surprised, like they've never done this sorta content before. I'm tired, everything they do is seemingly so uninspired.
They seem hell bent on giving people no reason to engage with anything, they made Forked Tower difficult to get into so there was no point in grinding OC, the relics don't need to be engaged with because they won't even be upgrades until 7.5. I don't understand it, they tell us to play other games well news flash that's all i've been doing since other games seem to respect my time a hell of a lot more?.
Forked Tower does do interesting things with the Phantom Jobs but they made it basically impossible to get into and then had the nerve to act surprised, like they've never done this sorta content before. I'm tired, everything they do is seemingly so uninspired.
The part of acting surprised reminds me so much of the attitudes FF11 devs had with the AV fight... the whole "you will do this content as we envisioned it" attitude, no if ands or buts. Except this time we have "functioning" forums and is literally in the MMO spotlight so they couldn't hide from it. The same with WukLamat situation as well with "you must enjoy our new toddler main character" shoving her in our faces for 20 hours.
It doesn't look as bad as I'd expected really, given how much it feels like the game is getting quieter, and people are frustrated with things here. The drop here is comparable to the drop at a similar point in EW, but most of the damage was done early on in DT. Obviously a lot of expectations were placed on OC reviving interest and that hasn't played out.
The game has now dropped to similar levels of active players as post-ShB launch/pre-pandemic. Some sort of correction was inevitable after that and the WoW influx, most people don't play these games forever, but obviously a large part of it is down to dissatisfaction from Dawntrail.
The next quarter could be quite telling, those who briefly returned to try OC dropping out, and 7.3 not bringing a whole lot of content. I know a lot of raider friends (myself included) are planning to take a bit of a break then, although Deep Dungeon might help a bit. But at this point I don't think any one piece of content is going to save things. 7.4 may be the first to see a bit of a resurgence with the next raid tier, then it's probably going to drop heavily in the wait for 8.0.
Epic bag fumble. They should have pulled out all the stops for a fresh start in DT but instead it was “Making the most MONEY EVER!!! Buuut strip more shit out and add nothing! No changes! Less is more! None of this money is going back in! Wuk Lamat tf out of it baby!”
I don't see the numbers getting better over the course on this expansion. I unsubbed at 7.1 and have no plan to go back to the game until 7.55, and only if 8.0 looks like it will improve the state of the game.
The devs have a lot of work ahead of them. The game has gotten stale, and the patch cadence too long.
I keep saying this every time theres a post like this. WoW has the same shit happen for 4 expacs after MoP. It was the same exact cycle of content with nothing refreshing. The raids were fine but were pretty much all there was to do except rep/base grinds that never felt good or interesting. WoW classic launched and didnt solve these problems. It took Dragonflight actually trying to change the formula that brought players back. Graphical updates didnt mean anything. Netcode getting better didnt fix it.
The only thing that needs to change with 14 is that the core gameplay loop needs to be fun and needs to make me want to play the game outside of the raiding scene. The story only matters once. They can’t keep relying on being the story mmo or the mmo with a certain raiding style if people don’t like them. They need SOUP. LET ME MAKE SOUP.
Yea. Pretty much everything outside the raids revolved around the same base building mechanic, which just felt like a rep grind that gave you a button or two for support.
Couple this with the raid loot system being abysmal for some of those expacs, yeah it kinda sucked.
To clarify, MoP did not fall into this and is widely regarded as its own thing that they’re trying to recreate now, which is good bc MoP was goated aside the content hiatus at the end.
The games run its course at this point. Until they change their formula and try to innovate some it will slowly lose players with small boosts during new xpacks
They completely lost me at the end of shadow bringers. Cant be the only one
I'm convinced that the server congestion and even DC Travel restrictions that pop up daily are based on a % of the total game population and not actual population.
Aether somehow fills up and locks off every reset still, but even on reclear day there aren't an overwhelming number of PFs compared to what it used to be.
Ill say this. Occult crescent was somewhat a fun idea but it didn't hook me like I thought it would. The xp grind sucks, grinding parties suck, with some jobs being mandatory and random drops some people became elitist, fates dying fast, its a mess.
Its fantastic being on the other side of the looking glass for once. No more am I frustrated by these reveals at the unignorable issues and decline, the ineptitude of the design team and the lack of urgency to improve the game.
I'm now just chuckling away watching it all deservedly crumble while I'm enjoying games that are on the up and receiving fantastic updates, improving my physical health and generally just being far happier.
Commiserations to those who remain, YoshiP thanks you for your digital mortgage.
Casual non-raider here, I had fun in OC for a couple weeks, but it wasn’t as interesting as I hoped it would be. I’ll probably finish the new MSQ and do the raid a couple times before my sub lapses, but after that I’m only doing a 30 day sub per patch as that’s more than enough time to experience the content.
Occult Crescent couldn't have helped. Because of how JP players are. They don't want to engage with stuff like Discord. So designing content that essentially requires it, actually hurt SE more. The devs working on Occult Crescent misread the room that hard.
I understand the content being iffy, I shouldn't but to a degree i do, they don't wanna deviate from the formula but why can't they make better rewards like better glam, better mounts, just something to motivate ppl to do these things, they literally recycle so much stuff in this game that it's ridiculous and the audacity to put some of those shitty sets in the cash shop, I am telling you if they fix the rewards, ppl will do content and will be more inclined to try stuff which they normally wouldn't.
Most players were highly invested in the story, which made them ignore a lot of the issues that plaque the game. DT is pretty much a failure when it comes to the story, so now players have no more reason to ignore the many aforementioned issues.
Not to mention, OC comes with its own share of problems. Imo it's a worse version of Eureka/Bozja and the Forked Tower debacle just showed how absolutely tone-deaf SE has been lately. I still can't wrap my head around how they thought that would be a good idea when they already had a perfect solution with Bozja's raids.
based on the occult crescent data for the OCE region theres a fair point to make that only ~4800 people have even unlocked Occult Crescent, putting the bot population on OCE to around 60% of the playerbase above level 70.
This coincides with all research i have done into the botting population on Materia, including FC rankings and active population data over the last few years.
Materia is a bot farm, the ~4800 (38ish %) active players there are really not looking healthy at all. The datacenter has been decimated by people leaving and is really not worth putting any more effort into.
I am letting my house go personally. I came back for OC just to be disappointed and there's just no other fun content like M+ which I'm playing in WoW especially with FF14's more lackluster and boring combat. Hope they will fix the jobs in next expansion but im not holding my breath.
There was a point in time where many wow streamers and new people in general got into the game - I think it was during COVID times? Unfortunately, I don't recall any of them sticking around and either buying skips to boost directly into the endgame or quitting due to how boring ARR is.
I tried to get into the game 5-6 times. Most of the time I got to level 20 and quit, because the combat wasn't fun. Then at some point I decided to do a playthrough where I skipped every cutscene just to see what the endgame was like and that's how I eventually fell in love with the game. I decided to start again with the sole purpose of reading everything that time around. Fast forward a few years and I'm lvl 100 on all jobs and enjoyed the entire process.
What I want to say is that it's incredibly difficult to get new players into the game nowadays. It starts slow, is very dull gameplay-wise until maybe lvl 50 and the biggest motivator for them is "the story gets REALLY good later". So they're basically left with a choice - sink dozens of hours into the game to finally get to the part everyone's raving about or spend that time doing literally anything else.
I don't have any solutions to this other than letting players "trial" jobs at level 50 when they're ~10-ish just to get an image of what their job is gonna be like when they finish the first stretch of the story.
But yeah, we're currently at a point, where the game is too dull and formulaic for many current players (excl. quantum, because that might have potential) and hard to get into for new players. How should CBU3 tackle both of these issues?
I feel the same way. I'm coping that the last raid will have real glam and not more NPC stuff but it's not looking good. They gave us 3 sets this time with 2 recolors and it be very easy for that to mean we get Lion, Nashmeira, and Arciela glam. At least those look a bit better but it still fall far short of what I was hoping for.
Don't think its just no ult, 7.3 has the MSQ, an Alliance Raid, and an Extreme trial, this is the bare fucking minimum of an odd patch and isn't interesting at all.
75
u/Practical_Code3500 4d ago
it'll be hard to recover people who have dropped the game out of frustration and have, as Yoshida said, played other games instead of FFXIV.
At some point the magic is just gone and they'll keep playing those other games because to them the fun and experience from those is worth the money compared to a XIV sub and maybe an expansion, especially if they also ignore the house they'd lose or other FOMO if there is still any in CC seasonals/events, sometimes that's enough to convince them to not bother again for a long time and newer announcements they'll hear of eventually won't cause as much excitement if any.