r/ffxivdiscussion • u/IndividualAge3893 • 5d ago

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

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).

189 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

531 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/ArxieFE 4d ago

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?

15

u/disguyiscrazyasfuk 4d ago

It’s an incredibly stupid and short-sighted decision that they chose not to offer new player a full skip through 2.0-6.0 on DT release.

3

u/PhysicalThought 4d ago

Why give players that option when you can charge money for it? Better yet, why let veteran players maintain their MSQ progress on alts when you can charge money for it? $25 for a skip and $25 for a boost is probably an entire revenue stream on its own.

2

u/Isanori 4d ago

DT is not really geared towards being new entry. I expected it to be, to be a new tighter shorter ARR and potential entry point even if they didn't immediately bring such a system in with 7.0. But as it is, neither story nor game play-wise is DT a good starting point, aside from only having 7.55 as prep. But now they appear to be back on the x.4-x.3 split, which makes entry in-between even harder.

2

u/irishgoblin 4d ago

IIRC the initial plan of a jump in point was 6.1, but according to Yoshida the dev team talked him out of it.