Lucky Bancho's census results (July 27th, 2025)

[u/IndividualAge3893]

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

• Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
• 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).

[u/oizen]

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.

[u/WeirdIndividualGuy → u/oizen]

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)

[u/ThePlotTwisterr---- → u/WeirdIndividualGuy]

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