Game is not dead but this long patch cycle + negative reaction to DT + ongoing design issues = people making the choice to quit. It happened for SB, and it's happening for DT.
|| || |pre x.1| post x.1|Result| |DT |-290k | -147k |-437k| |EW|+354k| -369k |-14k| |ShB |+242k| -221k |+20k| |SB|+167k| -5k |+162k| Stormblood had excellent player retention. The game gained a lot of players on 4.0 release and hardly anyone had disappeared by 4.1.
This can be worst than SB btw, mostly because SB still has things to do for holding ppl back to the game. With the mobile out so ppl will less likely care much. This is something more akin to WoW classic that might kill the retail version though
@@dale7326 I don't think the mobile game will have much of an impact. The overwhelming majority of Western MMO players play on PC exclusively and wouldn't consider playing on mobile.
@@mosley3485 Yea, but is it really in XIV case? The game has 30% or more are console players as well. Beside, majority PC playerbase of XIV aren't really care much about exclusivity that they have from the game so i wouldn't say it all the same as other MMOs. Large part that this game is still a Japan based MMO, that Lucky bancho reports seem to be looking into none specific systems so who knows how much that revolve around only PC related.
@@dale7326 Yes. I think the overlap between current FFXIV players and mobile players is miniscule. The whole point of the mobile game is that they're trying to tap into a new market.
My own two cents on what the problem is: Their hiring troubles are really starting to bite them in the ass. No amount of content can keep players occupied for almost five months between patches (when it used to be less than 3!), but there *isn't* even a big amount of content in the first place. Looking back at the crazy amount of stuff we got per patch back in 2.0 or 3.0, there's very little now in comparison. And on one hand I'm like "good, I don't want them to work themselves half to death like they used to", but much less content is still an issue. Having more people to work on different things simultaneously would help, but they've said several times that it's hard to find anyone, it's not a money issue, just finding people with the necessary experience, Japanese language ability, and so on. That could also be part of the problem why the story feels stale/reused to many, because there's not enough fresh blood to shake things up in the writer's room.
Hypara Striker isn't a real account. I can tell because whenever I direct reply youtube auto removes the comment no matter what I say. This is a paid comment by Square, I can't imagine any other company that would be willing to pay youtube for this.
I don't know about "dead game", but I think the 4,5 month patch schedule is very rough. Even after you wait that, there is barely anything in there, especially if you aren't interested in the harder raid content.
@@tryagain6691I've legit had people argue with me that exploratory content is Midcore simply bc of how long it takes to complete, but that's not the point. EW was so geared towards casuals, they dumped things down as much as possible.
@@vergil443 Then I don't know what people would consider casual content (Island Sancturay?). Repeatable, long form content, that almost everybody can do would be my description of casual content, but we can call it midcore, if anybody wants. It is still something that gives people a method to occupy themselves, while they are actually playing their max lvl characters and offers an alternative gameplay loop to raiding,. As I see it, EW mostly offered content for the raiders, so I can't really see it as a casual focused expansion. That said, I haven't played this game long enough to understand something like class design, that is usually brought up, when this topic is being discussed, nor can I really discuss raid difficulty, so if you feel like those outweigh the lack of the exploration zone, then I can see your point.
@tryagain6691 Nah EW was definitely not raider focused. No long term/competitive crafting events, no exploratory relic grind (they usually offer high end stuff like duals, BA, and DRS), variant which was pretty brain dead, and Island Sanctuary. It was all geared toward the most streamlined experience possible. All the savage/ultimate stuff was going to be there anyways. There's also the Ex mechanics which I found pretty lame and tame.
I've been playing since 1.0 so I've seen the game die literally once, and figuratively several times. It does suck when we hit lulls like this but they pass. This one is definitely going to feel worse than others because the patch cycle is a bit longer than it used to be. You'd think the dev team would learn to release the more repeatable content earlier in the patch cycle by now to help alleviate this. But yeah, game not dead, but the devs need to shake things up if they want people to be able to enjoy the game more often.
If the mobile version will bring more money then the PC version will probably see less and less care. Which probably will happen cause the entirety of China is huge on mobile games. There is a reason why they release it there first. Honestly a lot of the people are just sick and tired that we were financing other failed SE games, while only getting scrambles and now we even financed the successor of our game. GG to us I guess.
@@oszaszi I disagree, I think it'll be the opposite - if the mobile version works well, it'll be much easier to make the call to migrate the main game on UE4 and free it from the curse of the decade long spaghetti code. They'll have both experience and player feedback on if that's a great idea. Hell, players are asking for it even now, when just seeing the interface of the mobile game!
Seriously. This doom and gloom bullshit, now this is like the eight? Ninth? Creators who have jumped on the doom and gloom bandwagon because it generates clicks and comments. One stumbling expansion and the whole world is over.
Patch cycle is kind of ...bad right now. Also, I think the whole game needs a bit of a shakeup. Not saying other MMOs aren't also in their own formulaic mode... they are... and a lot of folks leave them as well. This is the first time I've unsubbed since 2020. I'll come back, for sure, but certainly waiting for something exciting to get me back in.
I've been playing since 1.0, and let me tell you, there have always been ups and downs. A part of the playerbase always freaks out when the numbers are going down instead of up, even though unlimited growth is pretty unrealistic in the long run. There are always phases when people are happier with the game and times when they play less. I think it was pretty obvious that the numbers would be down some with the lukewarm reception of DT, but they're still within a completely normal ballpark for a x.1 patch. Don't get me wrong, that is definitely something the devs need to keep an eye on, but I agree that it's not the end of the world that some people make it out to be.
@@yeetusdeleetus4697 I started playing with ARR launch and it was just very different. We had more content, shorter patches. The relics came out in 2.0 which was sooner due to shorter patches. 24-man raids were difficult enough it took time and focus to do. We had endurance raids and fights (healers spontaneously saving a run for example, and needing to be supported by BRD or BLM). Every fight felt different because things could go differently each time you queued and you still had a chance to clear. Now? Longer patches, less content per patch, content mostly focused on hard-core. Fight design relies on perfect play - meaning there’s no room for variance. The rogue died? Reset. One mechanic was missed? Death or reset. And we do that again and again until it’s perfect and identical and stale every time. This is boring. This is not fun. Every job playing the same too isn’t helping. No more job quests or anything that makes job choice personally meaningful. And honestly even the gear sets used to be unique (even if a bit janky) and are now either recolors or so standard that they never look like something new or different. The particle and glow effects for Abyssos made me believe for a second they’d course correct but nope. In short: The fights are mechanically complex but not exciting because they require perfection. The gear isn’t interesting visually or from a gameplay perspective. There’s less content aimed at less people. The game is running on good will alone but even that has its limits.
@ I agree, I was just shutting down the OP's bullshit response of "actually its always like this on downtimes c:" which is objectively not true. We've never lost 1/3 of our active playerbase on a .1 patch, in fact we've never lost players at all in a .1 patch til now
When they decided to have more time between patches, the reasoning was fine ... but they probably should've rethought the order in which to prioritize what came out in the .1 patches after that decision. I suspect if they had moved either Cosmic Exploration or Not the Bermuda Triangle up to .1 instead of holding it until later, a lot more people would feel like they have shit to do.
didnt help the story of dawntrail was a bit meh like i love the music and the vibes but the story felt weird only the end with the crystal really peaked my interest so im curious where patch content goes and if im honest i wish to have the scions over wuk lamat
I think the game is just going to see more prominent peaks and valleys as there is a lack of content for the broad player base to consume, until they change that. IF they change that.
They really gotta push up the exploration zone/criterion/relic grind content early in the expansion. Every x.0 - x.2 patch seems to be like this, but it's a little worse this expansion, likely because of the mixed reaction to the story.
And longer patch cycle, that doesn't help either. Plus, they should've released one of the more grindy contents sooner, either the exploration zone, relic, whatever, that would keep people a bit more distracted. Pushing everything to later patches hurts the game, even more when you need to wait 4,5 months for next patch...
Lucky Bancho looks at things like titles, achievements, and minion ownership to see where most characters are in content to dictate activity. That's all info that can be scraped off of Lodestone character profiles.
Sure, but someone can start the expansion and then immediately drop off, or play the entire way through the current patch and quit before the final quest. No achievements for those so no way to accurately record them.
some of reason of the drop of players could be: 1. main ascian story is over which a lot loved 2. long patch cycles so people are taking breaks 3. lack of longterm content for us to do while they make and release more content 4. new games coming out grabbing peoples attention (like monster hunter wilds at the end of february) 5. stale repetitive content form, by that i mean, square follows a formula, and while its good to have that as it keeps things consistent, sometimes things need to be shaken up and some players might be tired of the formula remaining the same
When they say it got dumbed down but the devs only focused on hardcore content they mean that the jobs are the simplest they've ever been to physically play but the game's been releasing some of their hardest fights.
The game practically feels like it's run by a skeleton crew that doesn't know how to design and develop fresh evergreen content. You can promise this kind of thing before the expansion's release sure, but when major patches are nearly five months apart waiting an entire year for most people to have something to do is a very big ask. The story being below par for what's expected for this game only shed a spotlight over one of the game's biggest glaring issues.
The problem with FF 14 is that they generate so much money but they don’t put it back into the game but they invest it in games like forspoken and life is strange . Hire more people ! And get a new engine!!
This is my third time being current in a new expansion, so I have seen this happen each time but there are a couple reasons I think it feels worse this time around. At this point in Shadowbringers and Endwalker I was diving back into Eureka and Bozja finishing up loose ends. In Dawntrail I don't really have that. I got my four clears of Eureka Orthos, it's also not a great source of exp to help me level my alts so I haven't stepped foot in there in over a year. I have done essentially everything with Island Sanctuary and the Varient Dungeons. I am interested in Criterion but I rarely see groups set up for that. Another major thing for me is the amount of content promised for Dawntrail, it is pretty stacked and exciting so I was hoping maybe they would be forced into releasing more stuff earlier rather than after the .2 patch to keep an even spread. Technically with Chaotic Alliance raid they did achieve that since it is new content that was promised making this a better .1 patch than normal but it is hardly enough to keep us going into 7.2. That being said I am looking forward to everything we are getting this year as this will be when we get to see most of the content promised for Dawntrail.
I would guess the "dumbing everything down while only releasing hardcore content" bit is about jobs being progressively simplified over the last few expansions while focusing mainly on harder content releases? EW didn't a field exploration zone, people are waiting on the relic grind to release for DT, so I'd guess that's what they're referring to?
It's an odd comment, but what I took from it was EW dumbed things down and geared it towards casuals to a ridiculous degree. Now DT hasn't released a ton of content, and the content it has released has been more geared towards hardcore or experienced players. The big thing to me for DT is the content is an improvement, but they need to stop holding onto certain content for too long.
@sataniaterumi9122 Well, assuming it's connected to the exploration zone again--which, idk if it is--and they're not doing a rerun of the Mandeville Weapons, yes, Rellic Grind. I vaguely remember Yoshi-P acknowledging the process of getting those was a disappointment, so I'm not without hope that they do it better this time.
What I _think_ the guy was meaning in the comments there, is that the storytelling felt more handhold-y(like the flashback scenes to just like 10 mins ago), while the battle-content was a step up in difficulty. Maybe? Feelings are difficult to write down in words imho...
Yea, there were definitely a few of those moments. Toward the end where Yshtola calls Wuk to relay a message to us, the wol, who has had a link pearl since...ARR. just weird decisions like that.
I do agree the game does need its own steady feed of content at all levels but I feel like "did you shotgun all the content in the first week or did you pace yourself?" ought to be a question people are asking themselves and each other. Also I enjoy making my own high end raider friends get all shifty eyed when I ask them how their casual content is doing when they complain about the game lacking content. Go ahead, ask an Ultimate Raider what their Doman Mahjong rank is. Or how their Big Fish tally is going.
So what's your point? It's not the players' fault that the content they want to play isn't being updated in time. Some people don't enjoy playing Mahjong, it's a story driven mmo, it's supposed to cater to many different types of players that are in it for different reasons.
@@iferan4166 I guess my point is that high end raid isn't the only content the game's Life should be judge by, as some people I know do. I agree that a wide cast of content is what's best for everyone, but will only ever satisfy as broadly or narrowly as each individual player's taste is.
@@Tazrael I mean true but at the end of the day, ffxiv is an mmorpg, it's an rpg game that multiplier, duh, but, a big part of that is fighting strong enemies right? It makes sense that people would judge the game, at least in a broad perspective, on how endgame bosses look like. At the same time like I said, it's a story driven too, so the story is a big part of the game....but they messed that part up royally, so another big part of why people are leaving is a crappy story. You could even argue that a lot of what kept people coming back to the game, despite it's flaws were the story, and now that the story is pretty bad it makes the other flaws all the more apparent. It's as if they lost reputation with their player base.
.1 patches are usually the lowest point of every xpac, but I think the lack of grindable progression is hurting right now. I'm having a blast with Chaotic and dipping my toes into Ultimate for the first time, but these are not the kinds of content that appeal to the vast majority of casual players. I think when we get our relic grinds, new explorable instanced zone, and the new island sanctuary in space, things will pick up quite a bit.
What people mean when they say "dumbing things down and only releasing harder content" they mean the class playstyle and content release. Classes being easier to play (dumbed down) while the only available content is hardcore content. You could make an argument for the Alliance quest, but those are 3 quests of "talk to an NPC" a day and you are done. If you are not a Raider, you have nothing to work towards that isn't dailies of going down the one hallway spamming your AOEs. Get to the boss, don't stand on the orange and press your buttons. You are done. Gearing up is a non-issue, you just buy it. And even then, why are you even gearing up? what does a casual player have to do that they need to gear up for? It's like how people kept telling me they were happy the Manderville Relics were easy so they could gear up their classes but they don't do anything with it. Some defenders didn't even finish ONE relic while I'm left there twiddling my thumbs without a proper grind and missions to fulfill the next step, just another tomestone exchange. I've been trying to play Black Mage just to keep myself awake during fights. If they dare dumb Black Mage down so you don't have to manage your Fire/Ice switch anymore I will fall asleep. I don't like that they gave us a button so the Ice phase stops ticking down so now I don't need to worry about it. Less to manage = Boredom (just like they keep taking away my dots in other classes) I've been enjoying Chaotic (when you get a group for it) but from the looks of it, the content will die and future ones will be dumbed down since people keep failing at it. Too many body checks from my experience. The extra month of development is being felt for sure, not to mention I was looking forward to PvP rewards but they added nothing past the battlepass ones... There's too much to go into detail in a comment, but I understand the frustration. The biggest thing right now keeping me subbed is my house I'm chained to. Edit: One more thing. "Go play something else" or "Play slower" I'm paying monthly for this game, I feel like I should be getting some of that money's worth. I know it's a little entitled, but money and time are being taken here. Not all of us can make a living out of streaming this to thousands of people.
To be honest, it's really feeling like XIV players got a 7/10 for the first time and now the sky's falling. Chanting "Dead Game" with every dip is just a tale as old as time. Warframe's "died" twenty different times according to its players, TF2 was "dying" for over a decade before it even dropped out of Steam's Top 20, etc etc. I've seen plenty of games *actually* die, and this isn't even **close**. "But if things continue to get worse-" yeah and if they don't then it'll turn out fine. No need to pile into the lifeboats now just because there's news about an iceberg somewhere out there.
Coming from Destiny 2, this game could be in a WAY worse spot than it is currently. Sure, the story wasn't very enjoyable and felt too predictable and the long content droughts between patches is certainly troubling, but at least it isn't as bad as Destiny 2 where half the content was removed from the game (yes, even paid DLC). Obviously, I encourange the criticism for the expansion because that will lead to them hopefully avoiding these mistakes a third time. It'd also help if they made classes able to compete with Pictomancer so people wouldn't be excluded from endgame because their favorite class isn't meta. Maybe in 8.0 Machinist will finally get some proper love
A possible reason besides content drought is probably the alliance raid being based around FF11, and during the first week, you have ff11 vets gushing with the memberberries at the references and locations causing people who have not played 11 giving that game a shot. I know half of my fellowship is back on 11 during the content lul right now and i might even give that game a shot as well.
Talking only about duties and rewards in the game... No ideia about anyone else, but i still have a insane amount of things to do, old things and new. (Im a Achievement hunter, currently almost getting to 18K points) the distribution of content could improve, of course, the thing is, it already is improving (not so fast as some pep want but it is) more things to do and rewards were promised in DT and in my opinion (comparing 7.0 / 7.1 to previous expansions like 5.0 / 5.1 and 6.0 /6.1) DT really is a doing a bit more than before. Field Zones, Relics (probably Tools too), Variant/Criterion, Cosmic Exploration, Deep Dungeons, new trials start usually on .2 patch too, new Blue Mage things are coming and Beast Master too... (Some of those, i wanted a bit early too)
I mean, good for you, but not only is not every content something that interests everyone, the bigger deal is that we already didn't have shit to do in Endwalker post patch lull, and that's when many players cleared out their backlog.
TBF, achievement hunters intrinsically always have the most to do. I think this whole thing is crazy overblown and there's nothing wrong at all, but at the same time I wouldn't say your slice of the community having plenty to do is a great indicator of that. On the flipside, I would say that a subset of the "there's nothing to do" crowd should really give achievement hunting a go. If you can get into it, you'll never run out of things to do.
Third! And before I watch this, I am guessing, no. FF14 is not becoming a dead game, there is just a content lull, it is usually how post-expansion patches are, big new numbers when they first drop and lower numbers the more we get into a expansion, people do what they wanna do and then move on to do other stuff. Hardcore raiders get their raids in and leave, PvPers do their ranking stuff and leave, story players play the story and leave, I think some of the only consistent players are the RP community, it also helps that FF14 has very little in the way of FOMO, sure you can argue seasonal events, but those rewards become buyable from the shop, so not really FOMO there, I do think the only form of FOMO that FF14 has are the seasonal PvP rewards, which only last for the pvp season before fully disappearing forever.
Well the issue is how fast the lull arrived. Normally, the lull happens around the end of the patch cycle but this one started when we’re still early in. The only credit I’ll give them is that there is a massive content lined up but it seems like they’re pushing it much later..?
@@cutejustice I mean, were 2 months into 7.1, next patch is 2 months away and only recently thing released was Chaotic which is not for everyone and closer to Savage than Extreme. No Midcore content to grind out in the lul and people will drop off. Numbers will go back up 7.2 for a month then go down again. happens every Expac cycle.
@EverianKalim Exactly, patch cycles are a lot shorter in FF14 then they are in WoW, and they are also very consistent. So players got the stuff out of the way they wanted to do, there wasn't really 4 months worth of content, but then again, no patch has that much content to hold a player base consistently for the entire lifetime of it, not unless you add a heap of collectibles and timegated content, and we all know how much MMO players looooove timegated content.
I mean DT is now 7 months in. There’s no content. They bungled chaotic the way they bungled Criterion and now we are going to get an ultimate before any grindable/exploration content comes out. If the relic content and cosmic exploration flop - which at this point they could? We know next to nothing about them - then DT offered nothing to anyone not into savage and up. Hell I am into savage and even I got bored. IMHO the game needs to diversify its difficulty. All content for all people sort of thing. The fights need to consider endurance vs performance because their “perfect dance” design philosophy has ran its course. The game has 2 core mechanics that separate it from competitors: 1) You can be all roles in 1 character. This cuts down on content as a lot of other games rely on leveling and re-doing content for engagement. This is exacerbated by the fact that both game play and core identity have been stripped from the combat roles. Everyone plays the same and there’s no unique path to pursue (I.e. all tanks play the same, have the same gear etc). They need to combat this by giving us unique gearing and class-options. We need armor per job, not per role. Each uniquely designed for that job. Maybe something like job-specific mounts? Something to counter the sameness and to give your one character a reason to do and master different things. The second mechanic is multiple rezzes. A lot of early FFXIV relied on exhaustion mechanics. You needed to perform mostly well, but could be rezzed and adjust. As such you needed to supply mana to your healers and use your lbs etc. Perfect play design means there’s again only one way to do things, and even 1 death could mean your entire party is done for. Healers feel pointless because you need to be perfect to get by. Messing up isn’t recoverable. So other than heal scripted damage the healer has nothing to do and no unpredictable situations to respond to. This severely undermines what is sold as a feature for the game. They aren’t doing enough. And what little they are doing is suppressing rather than enhancing what makes the game fun and unique. So yeah players are doing to dip. If you have a chance to do another press visit, this is worth discussing. I wish I could be in the room because I think they’d listened if it came directly to them, but the actual feedback is being filtered out by louder and meaner voices.
Kyle is absolutely right that you can play with statistics to tell just about any story you want. Change the parameters of your data until the numbers resemble the point you want to make. Change the sample size, range of samples, timeframe of samples, region of samples, etc.
I was showing people this when EA announced last year, Sims 4 pulled in 15 million new players. It's really easy to turn that into "Sims 4 had a 50% new player fall off compared to the 30 million they got the year before." It's that easy to reframe figures as a negative or positive.
Unironcally Garrett, you hit the nail on the head to me. People see these patches come out and feel like they need to get everything done IMMEDIATELY then they burn through what's new and go back to bitching about a content drought and it's just like... Maybe the reason there's a drought isn't necessarily because there wasn't a ton added but because you rushed through it and got it all done in a friggin' week in a patch that is meant to cover a few MONTHS. I get the complaints about there not being much in the patch judging by what I saw in the patch notes because I'm still working through the MSQ right now (I have two characters, one has finished 5.0 and is the character I play exclusively with my partner right now and the other has just finished the Naadam in Stormblood) but at some point people have gotta reflect on things and realise maybe they're not getting much out of the content because they're spending god knows how many hours trying to get it all done so damn fast. A 300,000 drop in the player count isn't gonna be anywhere near enough of a problem to warrant panic really because chances are a ton of them are coming back for 7.2 when that comes out. It just feels like the internet has to blow everything out of proportion now...
to further add to this 7.2 is a major raid patch which will keep players longer the odd number patches only have ex trials and 24 mans and those don't keep people engaged for long the even patches tend to hold players attention far longer
This is why I always do MSQ ASAP, but any side content, unlocking aether or any non-MSQ content I tend to spread out and take my time with. I would take MSQ slower if I could trust the community to not spoil things. When the game gets slow, I like to casually level side characters too. I know it's not everyone play style, but I tend to like it because I've grown to love past content I used to hate and found new perspectives on current content.
A week? There was barely enough content in 7.1 to last a day. The reality of the situation is that if you've been playing for a while and are caught up, there just isn't enough content to keep people remotely interested in the game. This isn't a small indie dev. We're talking about the flagship product of a multi-billion dollar company. It's kind of inexcusable.
@@mosley3485 As a endgame player, you either take a long break, find creative outlets, or get into achievement hunting. I know achievement hunting is dull, grindy, and can be somewhat on the unhealthy side, (depending on who you ask) but it'll keep you busy for years. The game becomes overwhelmingly stacked full of "chores" if you ever decide to hate yourself and go down that path. Then you will NEVER complain about drip feed content ever again.
@@thecrowonyourshoulder I'll probably be 100% achievements before 8.0 drops. Then what? Play the game for a couple of days every 4 months? I think a lot of people are starting to question whether it's worth coming back after a break.
It's definitely in a slump. But it's a fairly normal slump. If you don't raid, there is a 9 month stretch from 7.0 to 7.2 when we have a shot at content like Shade's Triangle and Cosmic Exploration. The expansion cycle promises a ton of content eventually but everything is heavily back loaded. In 6 years, a new player will hit the post Dawntrail stretch and have an embarrassment of things to do. Unfortunately, living in the moment means there isn't really anything on offer for a large number of the players so they're drifting to other things. Once we finally get to more patches they will come back. Right before Endwalker, they increased the time between patches from 3.5 months to 4 months because "The entire team is getting an additional 2 weeks of vacation per year so this is to compensate for the reorganization" and then after dawntrail, they silently slid in another two weeks. this puts us at 4.5 months of dead air between drops. Though they promise that the 14 team working on 2 other games while developing 14 had no effect on the game! They swear! It doesn't matter if anyone that has ever worked in a similar environment knows that isn't possible but they promise!
The problem with this is that, while people do keep coming back for the patches, the amount of downtime is getting larger and larger and the quality of a lot of content seems to be degrading over time. Eventually we'll hit a point where people don't feel that the content is worth waiting for and will move on permanently. For some people, it seems like that's starting to happen now. Something really needs to change.
Yeah, for me I'm not much of a raider so I skipped 7.1, but I am interested in the cosmic exploration stuff so will likely re-sub for that. It is more than fine as i had a bunch of time to play other games.
@@mosley3485 This. I'm a 1.0 player, so I stuck around even during the game's worst era, because while it was insanely flawed, it *felt* like it was moving into a better direction. It felt like my money and time and effort went towards something, and it felt like the devs cared, tirelessly working to fix the problems we reported, to add the things we missed, to give us something fun and interesting to do. Right now is the first time ever I'm actually unsubbed, because 7.1 is where I hit my "why should I?" moment. I finished 24 man and ex trial day 1, but then what? Keep spending for the next almost 5 months so I can sit in Limsa and people-watch or something? Doesn't seem worth it. Was gonna resub for the new hard 24 man at least, but they decided to drop it during Christmas when the majority of the Western playerbase is busy with family, and by now it's basically impossible to find a "from the start" group. At least I still plan to come back for 7.2 (since I have a static and enjoy Savage with them), but I can imagine some others who don't care for savage might not just go to only subbing once per patch but to just not subbing at all anymore.
Nice to see some older 1.0 players in here /wave. I am a closed Alpha tester I am almost 15 years playing this March ,Somebody pointed out that I have been here longer than Yoshi LOL. I love FFXIV but the game has changed so much now sadly and the lack of things to do is showing. I tend to duo old content just for fun or catch up on things I never got round to doing like my Card mount that took me years >.< as I did it mostly solo/duo. I miss the old days where we seemed to have more to do and there seemed to be more excitement within the game. I enjoy Island sanctuary but I did not enjoy the DT expansion it was lacking. The lack of hairstyles also not even a free one with the expansion is bad. We have less input from Yoshi these days and the housing situation for players is bad. I am lucky I have one but they should be accessible to all and it is a major fuck up by them when they did it the way did. I am unsure where the game is headed. I have seen it quiet before now and then they will do something to add some excitement which I am hoping they will do. They need to fix the story add more open world content and give the players something back instead of just adding glams to store all the time. PVP frontlines used to be fun they need to fix it somehow and give rewards for players.
This is the first time I've felt like not logging in due to lack of things I want to do. I finished Jeuno and the 5 seconds of mediocre story and... that's it for me. I don't think I could have completed the content much more slowly and had it be coherent at all, and outside of those two things, that's it. I'm not interested in the hardcore/savage content, and I've made peace with that in the past. This time, though, the lull is dragging on forever, and for the first time, I'm also not looking forward to the main scenario stories. The next alliance raid will pull me back in, but eh. I don't think FFXIV is becoming a "dead game" (how overly dramatic), but it certainly has become more of a "log in once a week for 45 minutes and then log out" kind of game for me.
One thing that has baffled me since the start of Endwalker's patch cycle that I don't think was really there until more recently is the getting upset at the minor patches having little in them and the need to not look at a patch as a whole. Or it's always been there but for me it hasn't been as prevalent in the past vs how it is now. As yes the minor patches are not going to have as much meat on them as the patch as a whole would. Yet there are those who are either being etremely hyperbobolic or truely do expect to recive an enitre patch worth of things to drop even in your .02,.03, .06. If not an entire expansion's worth of stuff. I do however feel that when and where things release should be shaken up or at least paired better. When I say pair better I'm talking about making content feel as though it is what it's supposed to be. For an example the pelu pelu society quest feels too much as though it should either have been our DoL or DoH quest line as you barely do any fighting during the story line or in the dalies. The same thing you could say about the final desgin of the Manderville weapons as they feell as they should have been the 1st tome weapons of DT if not the ones you got from the Arcadion. Everyone expected the joke weapons you can get now via map rng to have been the final looks or at least the starting looks to the Manderville as Hildibrand and Godbert are meant to be joke characters. I don't know why they stopped releasing the relic in the .1 patches like they did in ARR and HW. I can only think of two times when people griped about obtaining a BiS weapon during those two relic quests. One was that the ARR relic started off 5 ilvs lower than the one from the raid and people didn't like that what should be their Bis weapon was 5 ilvs lower than the tome or the one you could get from T5 or T9 i don't remember when they chose to boost it's ilv. In HW people thought that their possible BiS weapon could be one from the Daidem that might have been worse than spending a lot of money on a Gotcha game. The last thing I can think of as to why some might call the game dead is the ones who would complain about the devs not taking time to future proof the game before it reached to the point XI is in. Which is why we see a lot of the solo friendly QoL's happening right now. Course the game has been either dead or dying since 2.3 so what would I know.
There hasn't been a patch 7.2 yet so you are comparing horses to apples when you say DT is in a healthier spot than EW 6.2. Regardless. I happened to enjoy DT (mostly for the dungeons and normal raids) despite the story being a little wonky. The lack of repeatable/"grindable" content early on is a bit jarring given that was a complaint about EW, this time with a focus on the dead-fish that is Chaotic-AR. FF14 is lucky to have a very loyal fan-base and continues to attract many new players with an enormous amount of fun content, whether those players stick around/return is interesting. It is fair to say that while not "dead", nor is FF14 thriving.
People just wanna freak out, they don't even need an actual reason. And for the ones that are 'legit' worried about the game, I sorta blame the decreased attention span of the average gamer over the years. Yes, there are definitely things that can be improved but that's always been the case. To feel a huge leap in dread suddenly is largely an act of hysteria.
I didn't know there was a freak out about it. Personally I just feel like other games give more exciting things for my time. Maybe I'll come back in a year with more content to do.
I don't think it has much to do with reduced attention spans. I think the problem is that there was so little to do during Endwalker that most people exhausted the backlog of old content, now there's equally little to do in Dawntrail and people have nothing to go back to.
Right. XIV is still an insanely popular game and has an active player count most other MMOs would kill for, even if it has dropped a bit. We all know the moment a new expansion drops it will rise substantially. The game is a lot like WoW in that sense. The key is for them to make it an undeniably good expansion so the retention is higher
@@EldgardHammerheart-m9g I've been playing since 2.0. Whatever you might think about me (which is irrelevant?) the game isn't 'suddenly failing' just because a bunch of people suddenly feel like making a big deal about how they are dissatisfied and want everyone to pay attention to them. Which seems to happen periodically, but in increasingly more extreme demonstrations. This cycle appears to have less to do with the game than the nature of community engagement via social media and streaming. For my part, it's silly you assume I must be coping. Do you really find it unbelievable that there are still a lot of people who enjoy what the game offers?
There’s nothing casual to do in Dawntrail right now that I haven’t done already. Personally, I have to get into the headspace and allot time if I want to tackle hard content but during times where I want to run current small stuff, ff14 doesn’t provide that. All I do now is log on to do unreal and alliance raid and just leave until the next week. I really wish they released the beast tamer class right now and did small incremental updates. Alternatively, they should’ve released the supposed Dawntrail bozja early on. TLDR; it’s something for players to do while they curate current content. Edit: also, I think there’s a bit of dishonesty here when talking about “dumbing things down and releasing hard content being a mistake”. While the statements do clash with each other, the reality of the matter is that 14’s definition of hard content is unfairly punishing. If one player messes up then everyone suffers. They’ve gotten too cushy with body check designs that it makes the content sometimes unplayable because if 7/8 of us are doing the dance right but Jim Bob keeps messing up then we all wipe. It’s discouraging. EX3 made me feel burnt out BECAUSE people continuously messed up on meteors during farming. That’s why I personally have to brace myself for all that nonsense. I wish they just let people die, get rezzed and we continue but here we are.
I don't want them to just let people die, get rezzed and the party continues. That's how you get bad players carried through hard content. That's why there's a huge disparity currently between EX and Savage. In EX, bad players are allowed to be carried over to the finish line while Savage doesn't let you do that. To be fair, maybe body check design shouldn't exist in EX and I personally haven't touched EX3 (been waiting for my static to get back from the holidays so we can do it blind) so I don't know if EX3 is actually "unfairly" punishing. But there needs to be punishment in difficult content and enough incentive for the player to get better to overcome that. There's currently no incentive. They''ve tried time and time again to dangle "casual" player rewards like cosmetics and glam in difficult content. Instead of rising to the challenge, the "casual" players complain that the rewards don't suit the content. There's no helping it. Of course they're going to think like this when 90% of the game can be drooled through and the supposed bridge to more difficult content (Extremes) is allowing players to be carried through to get the rewards.
@@Jaxter0987 certainly there are better ways to incentivize people to do better than to wipe a whole party and progression because of one person’s mistake. Regarding bad players: they are currently sneaking into prog parties right now by lying about what phase they’re in for accelerated progression. Honestly, I don’t care if a player gets carried in an extreme. Especially when it’s a farming party that’s meant to be done over and over again. If a player wants to get carried 100+ times by different people go ahead but Godspeed if people will have the patience for it. Maybe there’s room to discuss where and when it makes sense to have body checks.
@@Jaxter0987I'm good with players being carried a bit because it's four fights at a time and twelve per expansion. If you want a fight that's punishing, do ultimates. As a bad player, I am tired of funding a dozen savages that demand perfect runs from eight people. Ultimates are at least kind of understandable to have that direction.
I think some people just play the patch and the msq then stop playing until the next patch. Everyone is different, I still play and still love the game.
I've been subbed and playing since 1.0 beta and for the first time, I just don't care enough to keep subbed. The new story was very underwhelming, the only characters I liked was erenvalt and Otis. The whole tuliolal storyline was just stupid and full of plot holes with very weak character development and I also know that if I just resub after 7.55 comes out I can spend a month catching up on the story and content then quickly be ready for 8.0, if that is even going to be worth it. I remember I didn't like Stormblood but at least I finished it and kept up in Eureka cause that was something engaging. I just don't feel the need to get on the gear treadmill only to have it replaced by the next patch. The only things that might bring me back before .55 would be beastmaster and whatever the "Eureka/bozja" content is, if it's fun and engaging.
same, i played since 1.0 first day, and almost never stopped my sub but dawntrail, i skipped alot of cutscenes what i never did before just wuk here wuk there, after the msq ended i unsubbed lost my house. i dont feel like playing again, maybe when beastmaster comes out. until then its monster hunter wilds for me.
@ruepel15 this expansion is just a huge miss for me. Hopefully the side content makes it worth while but I'm not going to hold my breath. My biggest reason for dropping off is the boring reward treadmill, even as glamor options, nothing appeals. There's no "must have" gear, it's all just timed glamor, the only reason you would need the high end gear is to fight the high end content that you can just walk over after the next patch. Make gear matter again!
Exactly my thoughts. I play since 2.0 and from time to time I pause the resub, but since 7.05 savage I don't see a reason to come back to the game before the next patch (maybe to catch up, if I do come back) The game focused way too much on casuals, turning the game ridiculously easy during most of the time, keeping the same formula in so many points, nothing interesting new, jobs are mostly like the same thing and sometimes too simple. I liked Endwalker story, but it had too many fillers, though acceptable. Dawntrail is a lot worse, story is not cool, characters are not good, half of the soundtrack is a reuse of old songs. At some point I realized I can do hell much more with what I used to pay with that subscription.
This time feels different, the player base is aging and you ain't getting newer younger players in because they don't play MMO's. Many of my friends are in their mid 30's now and have just enough time to play a couple of hours before life takes over, and there are so many better stories out there in other games that almost all of them decided DT was not worth it. The base game has soured us enough that none are coming back until next expansion at the very least. By that time they will be much nearer to 40 so who knows if they will ever return. But don't take my word for it. Just see how it looks like by the end of DT. Apathy is at an all time high.
A large dip in players is normal between updates. Difference between now and shadowbringers time is that the game doesnt have a large influx of players coming in between updates and the negative response to DT..
Behold engagement! I've just set some personal goals in the game and found a chill group of people to do Eureka with. Trying to stack as much Gil as possible before the new exploratory zone comes out. I'm pretty midcore and the last couple years I've been making my own fun, but I can see people who've been playing longer than me to feel the lulls even harder and that kinda sucks. Devs shaking up the content cycle and dare I say it...double down on customizations. The drip feed of hairstyles is kind of a bummer XD I would love some new bangs for existing hair styles. Let's gooooo
We're gonna need Natsuko Ishikawa dressed as Dr Doom announcing her taking over the writing at the next Fanfest to fix Dawntrail's hype. People coming off of Endwalker getting hit with insufferable characters, terrible worldbuilding and contrived situations bounce *hard*
Honestly the only thing carrying the game for me for the last couple expansions was the main story. I just really don't get into savage, and as a launch player I've pretty much done everything else. I've done all the crafting you can do. I've done all the side content you can do. I've done pvp. I've done some Savage and extremes. And the only thing keeping me going was the main story arc. And when that wrapped up, it was awesome, but I also kind of just lost any interest in continuing to play. The new story lines were fine but I just wasn't invested in them and didn't care that much. I ended up canceling before the current expansion even came out. Better access to large housing might have helped out for a while but even then you can only do so much.
Game is not dead, just in a lul. But it does not help that for some reason the game actuvely punishes people catching up to content if they arent around week1. Im looking at you, multiplivative first timer bonus on chaotic raid and the shitty savage weekly loot lockout.
As long as the player numbers stays in the black on the ledger, the ups/downs shouldn't be 'doom and gloom',, but instead be great feedback times for CBU3. For example, I'm still "subscribed" but haven't played much since just before Thanksgiving. I'm in my 50s, 4 kids, a grandson and lots of family. If something big in-game was happening, I'd be playing a bit, but atm, family time is most important. I'll be jumping on regularly again starting this week... so i guess I'm an "In-acive but actively subscribed player"???
No it doesn't show that DT is a success. We'll see when 7.2 numbers are out. But both SHB and EW showed that it sustained or even gained numbers from x.0 to x.1. DT lost 300k in that span. SHB and EW lost 300k in x.1 to x.2. So will DT fall even further in that timeframe?
i think people are really hurt by how bad the msq was and on top of that there have been other characters that were better than Wuk Lamat that they sidelined immediatly at the mere sence of backlash and this is the hill they want to die on they also have not innovated anything like at all after 10 years people want some changes specially in the "start of a new chapter" when you label your MMO as a Narrative Driven MMO dont be surprised when people leave when the story is garbage theres also the fact it takes them so long to bring out a patch that at best gives you 1 week of content wich makes you wonder "wtf are they doing during 4 months ?". something that i noticed in the live letters is that everytime anything gets sugested that is a QoL the instant reaction on the devs faces is almost in the line of "OH MY GOD I GOTTA WORK NOW ? OH GOD NO", it feels like they dont really play their game anymore and are just going through the motions.
I figured that games have lulls and drop offs usually. For MMOs, it's a bigger deal, and definitely CBU3 may want to consider its patch content for heavy users. I personally have lulls where I go away and try other games and... have a life, where I am learning new hobbies and tackling IRL life/work stuff, so I appreciate lulls in the game and even if the game didn't have lulls, I would go away and do other stuff. TLDR, I think people like to catastrophize.
this is the same its always been in this game people just forget this or its new players joining that are no used to the ebb and flow of this games player counts endwalker was kinda in a weird spot since the massive influx of new players that kinda changed the norm but its just going back to how its always been
I would be interested in finding out what "active" means according to this. The high point of my FFXIV experience was definitively Endwalker, and I heavily played and subscribed consistently throughout Endwalker patches. I personally felt there was nothing lacking in any of that. Dawntrail, the lowest low of interest levels since I began my experience when Heavensward was out when I initially played, has brought me little to no desire to actively play the game myself. The reason I stay subscribed (on and off) is to keep my housing and not let it be demolished. My interest now has nothing to do with current content, but rather getting my family and friends up to the point of Endwalker's climax, playing alongside them and enjoying their journey with them. Everyone I personally know in my circles are in the same position. I haven't lost hope in FFXIV, but I do fully feel that Endwalker was a perfectly good ending and I didn't need or even necessarily want anything more from FFXIV beyond that. That is how I mentally resolve Dawntrail and onwards. Different game, different experience, doesn't hit my interests.
@15:56 it's dumbing down of extreme and savage and jobs, and then people only seeing effort put recently into FRU and Chaotic raid. Traditionally, FF midcore wants harder job options, and harder 3rd/4th floor savage boss. They don't want to do ultimate and Chaotic raid feels like heroic/mythic wow raiding virus
I also want to say as a person who was subbed since Stormblood, I think most of the issue is there just being a lack of conent in general because we finally had breathing room during covid to do past content. That was honestly the best time to play 14 because so many people were playing so it was easy to get people together for Eureka, deep dungeons, work on relics, older raids and Ultimates, and level up alternate jobs. By 6.2 I was just bored. The story was not that captivating for me, I did the side content I wanted to do, my friends were not playing at the moment... So I decided to unsub until a month before Dawntrail came out so I could play catch up. Dawntrail was not a fun time for me personally, so I didnt bother with savage when it came out and just came back for patch content. I'll come back if Cosmic Exploration is actually fun.
I'll say the game isn't dead and i'll use the free days they give us to finish the main content and level grind but im only renewing when i want to use those 30 days and work on my Crafting logs
This feels line a click bait video about a clickbait topic honestly, which I feel bad saying but this and the article both don’t need to exist other than to garner views and cause the community to argue so creators have content to cover during patches. We’re in the tail end of a patch lull, its the holidays when people are busy, and start of the year and upcoming titles mean of course people are playing other things at the minute.
this happens every 2 years lmao my answer is no but the reception of dawntrail was quite concerning to me personally. hopefully we get more midcore content
A game that sells itself on its story first, has a very poor outing with a new writer. I'll give two annologies. If you over-salt your food it will never taste good, Its often better to under-salt the meal. Painting a molded out home is not going to fix the problem. There are structural issues with XIV on the combat side that have taken them 2 patch cycles to fix, they are no where near where the combat should be. They have a massive engine issue that needs to be addressed. While other companies are working to update their engines and future proof their games...Square has chosen to put a timed sunset on XIV. The robbery of XIV's coffers to pay for other games really does harm to the game itself. Then on top of all of this, most of the community feels they were served a salty meal with the 7.0 story.
As someone who quite ffxiv over how badly SB was written and only came back because of Viera reveal a year later. This is all just so much of an overblown "ffxiv is dead" propaganda from people who forget how bad Stormblood really was. Remember most of the great QoL features that made SB bearable for new players was not there during Stormbloods launch. No you could not solo Eureka on launch and your kit was painfully bad and you couldn't use a mount in Eureka until playing for quite a few days for the normal person. No, SB was not fun to play on launch.
I'm significantly newer to this game than a lot of people watching (joined during EW patches) and still have several allied societies to max out, land/hand classes to max, etc. So I'm good when it comes to daily content even though there's a lull. I'd imagine that if you don't have that stuff to catch up on or you're not interested, then there's not much reason to log on every day right now. Hopefully we get some good repeatable content soon.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. There wasn't much to do during Endwalker, so people went back and finished off all the old stuff that they hadn't finished yet. Now there isn't much to do in Dawntrail either and people don't have anything to go back to.
the games been the game the whole time, if people dont want to play it anymore thats fine, id rather have a smaller community than all the toxic wow players that surged in to raid.
my opinion stayed same from title to finishing watching, is FF14 a dead game? no. is their content normally pretty bare bones in .0 to .1 patch ? absolutely if your not a player like myself who plays for extreme/savage or ultimate. Shadowbringers/Endwalker/Dawntrial were mainly story, they had odd side quest thing you could do like role quests, Manville etc. but none of the main outside content is there unless your running extreme/savage/ultimate content comes out before .25 or .35 patch... you never get relic weapon or content based item like Bojza or Criterion till .25 patch even island sanctuary didn't come out till 6.2, realistically after you finish the capstone quest, there's very little to do unless you play for the hard content in the game or you go back to grind old achievements/old mounts etc. is that a flaw in 14? probably, I can see a lot of players who aren't wanting hardcore content and want more casual to midcore content, its evident in my FC where most people have took a break. I've even seen hardcore people dip this expansion as they are bored of the combat loop of easy classes and 8 man locked in mechanics which you wipe to till everyone gets it without a form of recovery. should people go play other games? absolutely, as someone who made WoW/LoL/OW1 my main games when i was a kid, i missed out on some complete bops of games, FF14 my main game but i always take the time to go appreciate new game releases between my scheduled raiding, taking time out from a game is healthy and needed.
Yeah. I stayed subbed until a month ago this time around because I was actually way more into the game than normally, but personally I've always found the time from finishing x.0 content until around x.2 or so is a no-brainer break time from the game. x.1 is always a few small chunks of content and an msq patch which serve mainly as a short x.0 epilogue and a tease for the much more interesting x.2 and x.3 story. This one was no different. In fact I would argue it was one of the best x.1 patches. It's just that x.1 is always weak so that's not saying much.
I stopped after Shadowbringers during Covid, the fixed rotations and lack of flexibility in character building made it stale for me. The endless glazing of the how the story was basically high literary art by the community also turned me off (it was good for an MMO but nowhere near the best in gaming).
They stacked the early content full of savage and savage-like activities. I don't want to do that and even the best MSQ can't keep people subscribed for a full year.
At this point, I feel it's pointless to talk about this as this cycle has been a thing forever. At least since SB is not HW. The dry patches are just a few weeks longer after EW due to them wanting to give the team an extra few weeks of rest. I don't want this game to become like other MMOs back in the day, where they drained so much time, that trying other games was near impossible. FF14 easy to pick back up style is enjoyable. And yes, FF14 has problems, but a number of them would at this point need a total rebuilt to csat off the remains of 1.0 code still cursing the game. We can see this with the mobile ff14 alone, due to it being it's own entire thing. Plus you know Square loving to take the money FF14 earns and put most of that elsewhere.
The cycle has never been like this. They changed the patch release cadence from 3 months to 4.5 months during 6.1 and they never front loaded all of the raids and back loaded all of the casual content
Its game journos trying to get attention imo. Game feels like always with queue times etc. Chaotic being pretty high on demand... Right now is towards the end of a patch. Its always low activity around that time... nothing new
No it's not. This happens just about every patch cause people have other things to do and enjoy rather than logging in for doing dailies when it dosent matter when the next patch comes around. Also I know alot of people see Endwalker as the end of the game and have stopped playing either permanently or are waiting till the next expansion so they can breeze through the entire story in a few weekends to see if it's something they wanna invest their time with. I personally have stopped playing until 7.2 cause I'm in the I have better things to do group and am enjoying reducing my backlog and the extra pay from the overtime I've been doing. Those numbers will go back up like always.
For people that love the game, Final Fantasy XIV seem to be completely infatuated with it ending. Unless they hate it. It's hard to tell sometimes. Honestly, if you enjoy the game, sub numbers don't matter. Less people playing does not invalidate your enjoyment of it. If you don't enjoy it, stop playing it. If you have friends in game, if they're really friends, discord and other things exist. If they don't want to talk to you if you leave the game, they were never friends, they are co-workers. If you don't want to leave because you have a house, if that's the only reason you stay, there are many games that allow you to decorate a house and show it off to other people that do a better job at it. If you don't want to leave because you still love it, but just want it to get better, sorry, the game will never you love you back, and you staying will not fix it. You're just going to get miserable and bitter. If the game dies, it dies, there will be, and are, other games. Enjoy the good memories it gave you and move on. And if you rejoice, are positively giddy, at any little news that suggests the game is dying, that is an acceptable reaction...for a war criminal. Not for a video game that you played for years and got bored with. Get a new hobby and let go. The game can't hurt you anymore.
Honestly, I think the big migration from WoW back in ShB brought over enough of the doomers from that game to give us this effect. I dropper that game at the start of BFA because of this kind of attitude. Legion was probably the best WoW expansion since WOTLK, but while it was current, half the playerbase was obsessed with ranting about how it was dead. I came to greener pastures over here and what criticism there was felt like nothing in comparison. Then the WoW migration happened, and all the doomposting happened to kick up a few gears right as the bulk that demographic was getting caught up on their backlogs.
The boring story could simply be skipped but the attrocious job design decisions that plagued the game since EW, i.e. murdering Arcanist class, consequently turning SMN into a 1-button snoozefest, making SCH discount WHM, removing pet mechanics, making BST a limited job, tanks having access to very strong healing, among others, have killed any enthusiasm i have left for the game.
I have unsub in ffxiv this last 2 months, there are just good games released this later quarter of 2024, played a lot of space marine 2 and now path of exile 2, im also playing wuthering waves right now a gacha game. its not that dawntrail is bad i just wanna play some more games beside ffxiv and I dont have enough time to sub and play ffxiv everyday.
This, I was almost nonstop subbed to FFXIV for about two years but now I’m taking some time to play other games. Also just not in a place to be paying yet another subscription.
Why are people so concerned with subscriber count? I understand from a business perspective why they want as many players as possible but from a player perspective more players isn't always better. The FFXIV community was great even when it was a little bit smaller.
Because a lot of content creators (not these guys obviously) have benefitted greatly from growing and feeding a doomer population in the playerbase, who have been convinced for years that the game is dead and it's all ruined now, unless we like enough video essays or scream loud enough on Twitter. And that was without any evidence to back their claims up. Now they have a number going down, so they're all vindicated and confident that the entire playerbase is about to drop the game.
Is it hard to subscribe for the game? I would say yes. I mean, XIV does having this problem not just one update or two. This has persisted since HW to SB and recently changes in EW to DT. You can look up all the changes happen cause the amount of ppl in game right now it definitely lower than normal patch cycle
People are baffled by an MMO that respects your time. This is normal for FFXIV. People stop playing so they can play some other things before the next expack.
Thank you. People are still so WoW-pilled. Not a knock against WoW, but the skewed "normal" it established. People feel like if they aren't logged in with the 24/7 HIGHEST PLAYER COUNT then the game is dead to them. I get wanting more to do in the game, but quality BUG FREE content takes time. CS3 has decided they will take smooth, predictable launches with a schedule that respects their employees and casual players time to experience other games. Yoshi-P does not want people to be FFXIV-only players. But if you try to tell people "play something else" they say "but i don't wanna play something else" BUT THAT'S A YOU PROBLEM. It's not FFXIV's job to give you ENDLESS content. The world already has that. The loudest complainers are content creators because they've made FFXIV their job...when it specifically isn't meant to be a job. All due respect to the GG duo. Though, I think they've been around enough to weather this.
this happens every expansion some one brings up dropping numbers but we growing over all every year its disingenuous and misleading thanks for coving it the right way
It doesn't though. If you look at the Lucky Bancho report, it specifically shows that the % drop off post 7.0 is exponentially greater than that of any other expansion.
Are you perchance in an FC? Did you check game FCs for active members? Do you perchance owned a house? Did you require to subscribe of sort? If not, then that really happen though. I don’t doubt what ppl are saying because it has been like this since EW. There was a surge in DT but that the ppl from HW and SB that getting back to the game and now they leave again.
The worst character ive had to experience with Nimbus from Destiny 2 at second place. Hopefully they do as usual, enough backlash and Wuk lamat is left eating tacos in the main city of the expansion to be seen again in the expansion that will end this storyline ;)
The trend comes up every time there is a lull of any kind and some how this topic pops up. It had one big long cycle of this for End Walker and a small one after SB. All I can say is people are cont. to level their chara, new players are coming into the game. and older players are on farming . I do know some who left but that had to do with money issues,
I'm one of those 'active users' that dropped off. Subbed since SHB, unsubbed after finishing the Dawntrail MSQ... dont plan on coming back till the next expansion if they don't drop the ball again
I started playing during Stormblood and remember how empty my server was (you could just wander up and buy a house!), so I extra haven't noticed a 'decline' yet, yeah. :P
Not really that normal though, you can get 20-40% of your playerbase to drop a game but not 50% to 70% since that can be a sign that the game isn’t doing well
I don't understand people who complain about a content drought and remain subbed. Before you bring up the argument about housing, the number of players who own a house is a huge minority, much lower than the seemingly high number of players complaining about a content drought. Literally unsub from the game and come back next patch. I have people in my static with whom I attempt week 1 Savage clears with literally unsub once the tier is cleared. They're not interested in much else the game has to offer, even 7.1 content didn't bring them back. They're simply playing other games until 7.2. Why can't more players understand this? YoshiP understands this and has expressly told people to play other games and unsub in the mean time if you feel burned out. While its not the exact same message, the point stands. If you're unhappy with 14 right now because there's no content for you to enjoy, just unsub and play other games. Come back next patch when there's content you enjoy.
How can you say "I don't understand" and then immediately follow that up with "before you bring up". Stop being pedantic, there's thousands of players with houses who feel like they're being held hostage by their house.
I mean, it's clear they aren't talking about people with houses? House owners are a very smaller percentage as they said. There's a limited number of houses per server and a multitude of *other* people who don't have that excuse. @@BaithNa
I think what you are missing here is other games are not FF14. Suggesting to unsub and play other games is good, if you want to play other games, but it is useless if you want to play FF14 and are faced with the fact, that you completed everything that you were interested in. Now that by itslef wouldn't be a problem, as no dev team can produce infinite new content, but it becomes a problem when the new content they bring in doesn't last long enough to satisfy people.
Anyone getting defensive or failing to acknowledge that this game is NOT in a hospital bed at the ER is in denial and delusional. Wake up. But idc that much. Just here to vent negative feelings and been done with this game for a couple years now. Can’t believe some of you have been following this game like a sheep since beta.
My problem is you can't even get good discussions of Dawntrail going, at least in the places where I've frequented, because inevitably some quarter-wit storms in and goes "WUK LMAO BAD DEAD GAME" and that's all that you ever hear.
Game is not dead but this long patch cycle + negative reaction to DT + ongoing design issues = people making the choice to quit. It happened for SB, and it's happening for DT.
|| || |pre x.1| post x.1|Result|
|DT |-290k | -147k |-437k|
|EW|+354k| -369k |-14k|
|ShB |+242k| -221k |+20k|
|SB|+167k| -5k |+162k|
Stormblood had excellent player retention. The game gained a lot of players on 4.0 release and hardly anyone had disappeared by 4.1.
This can be worst than SB btw, mostly because SB still has things to do for holding ppl back to the game. With the mobile out so ppl will less likely care much. This is something more akin to WoW classic that might kill the retail version though
@@dale7326 I don't think the mobile game will have much of an impact. The overwhelming majority of Western MMO players play on PC exclusively and wouldn't consider playing on mobile.
@@mosley3485 Yea, but is it really in XIV case? The game has 30% or more are console players as well. Beside, majority PC playerbase of XIV aren't really care much about exclusivity that they have from the game so i wouldn't say it all the same as other MMOs. Large part that this game is still a Japan based MMO, that Lucky bancho reports seem to be looking into none specific systems so who knows how much that revolve around only PC related.
@@dale7326 Yes. I think the overlap between current FFXIV players and mobile players is miniscule. The whole point of the mobile game is that they're trying to tap into a new market.
My own two cents on what the problem is:
Their hiring troubles are really starting to bite them in the ass. No amount of content can keep players occupied for almost five months between patches (when it used to be less than 3!), but there *isn't* even a big amount of content in the first place. Looking back at the crazy amount of stuff we got per patch back in 2.0 or 3.0, there's very little now in comparison. And on one hand I'm like "good, I don't want them to work themselves half to death like they used to", but much less content is still an issue. Having more people to work on different things simultaneously would help, but they've said several times that it's hard to find anyone, it's not a money issue, just finding people with the necessary experience, Japanese language ability, and so on.
That could also be part of the problem why the story feels stale/reused to many, because there's not enough fresh blood to shake things up in the writer's room.
DEI hit square. They no longer hire based on merit. This has been well documented by internal company documents. Use google.
@@loganrogers4560 shut up
@@loganrogers4560 holy crap! nobody asked.
@@Hypara_Striker holy crap! I hate you
Hypara Striker isn't a real account. I can tell because whenever I direct reply youtube auto removes the comment no matter what I say. This is a paid comment by Square, I can't imagine any other company that would be willing to pay youtube for this.
I don't know about "dead game", but I think the 4,5 month patch schedule is very rough. Even after you wait that, there is barely anything in there, especially if you aren't interested in the harder raid content.
EW was geared towards casual play and it was boring af
@@vergil443 Was it? It was even missing the exploration zone, that most people would consider the major casual content of the game.
@@tryagain6691I've legit had people argue with me that exploratory content is Midcore simply bc of how long it takes to complete, but that's not the point. EW was so geared towards casuals, they dumped things down as much as possible.
@@vergil443 Then I don't know what people would consider casual content (Island Sancturay?). Repeatable, long form content, that almost everybody can do would be my description of casual content, but we can call it midcore, if anybody wants. It is still something that gives people a method to occupy themselves, while they are actually playing their max lvl characters and offers an alternative gameplay loop to raiding,. As I see it, EW mostly offered content for the raiders, so I can't really see it as a casual focused expansion.
That said, I haven't played this game long enough to understand something like class design, that is usually brought up, when this topic is being discussed, nor can I really discuss raid difficulty, so if you feel like those outweigh the lack of the exploration zone, then I can see your point.
@tryagain6691 Nah EW was definitely not raider focused. No long term/competitive crafting events, no exploratory relic grind (they usually offer high end stuff like duals, BA, and DRS), variant which was pretty brain dead, and Island Sanctuary. It was all geared toward the most streamlined experience possible. All the savage/ultimate stuff was going to be there anyways. There's also the Ex mechanics which I found pretty lame and tame.
I've been playing since 1.0 so I've seen the game die literally once, and figuratively several times. It does suck when we hit lulls like this but they pass. This one is definitely going to feel worse than others because the patch cycle is a bit longer than it used to be. You'd think the dev team would learn to release the more repeatable content earlier in the patch cycle by now to help alleviate this.
But yeah, game not dead, but the devs need to shake things up if they want people to be able to enjoy the game more often.
Exactly. It's not at any risk at all. It's a lower point, for sure, but that's the nature of MMO's.
Just look at WoW.
If the mobile version will bring more money then the PC version will probably see less and less care. Which probably will happen cause the entirety of China is huge on mobile games. There is a reason why they release it there first. Honestly a lot of the people are just sick and tired that we were financing other failed SE games, while only getting scrambles and now we even financed the successor of our game. GG to us I guess.
@@oszaszi I disagree, I think it'll be the opposite - if the mobile version works well, it'll be much easier to make the call to migrate the main game on UE4 and free it from the curse of the decade long spaghetti code. They'll have both experience and player feedback on if that's a great idea. Hell, players are asking for it even now, when just seeing the interface of the mobile game!
Seriously. This doom and gloom bullshit, now this is like the eight? Ninth? Creators who have jumped on the doom and gloom bandwagon because it generates clicks and comments. One stumbling expansion and the whole world is over.
Patch cycle is kind of ...bad right now. Also, I think the whole game needs a bit of a shakeup. Not saying other MMOs aren't also in their own formulaic mode... they are... and a lot of folks leave them as well.
This is the first time I've unsubbed since 2020. I'll come back, for sure, but certainly waiting for something exciting to get me back in.
I've been playing since 1.0, and let me tell you, there have always been ups and downs. A part of the playerbase always freaks out when the numbers are going down instead of up, even though unlimited growth is pretty unrealistic in the long run. There are always phases when people are happier with the game and times when they play less.
I think it was pretty obvious that the numbers would be down some with the lukewarm reception of DT, but they're still within a completely normal ballpark for a x.1 patch.
Don't get me wrong, that is definitely something the devs need to keep an eye on, but I agree that it's not the end of the world that some people make it out to be.
I've also been playing since 1.0 and I have never seen the sentiment for the vast majority of the playerbase be so negative. Ever.
@@yeetusdeleetus4697 I started playing with ARR launch and it was just very different. We had more content, shorter patches. The relics came out in 2.0 which was sooner due to shorter patches. 24-man raids were difficult enough it took time and focus to do. We had endurance raids and fights (healers spontaneously saving a run for example, and needing to be supported by BRD or BLM). Every fight felt different because things could go differently each time you queued and you still had a chance to clear.
Now? Longer patches, less content per patch, content mostly focused on hard-core. Fight design relies on perfect play - meaning there’s no room for variance. The rogue died? Reset. One mechanic was missed? Death or reset. And we do that again and again until it’s perfect and identical and stale every time. This is boring. This is not fun. Every job playing the same too isn’t helping. No more job quests or anything that makes job choice personally meaningful. And honestly even the gear sets used to be unique (even if a bit janky) and are now either recolors or so standard that they never look like something new or different. The particle and glow effects for Abyssos made me believe for a second they’d course correct but nope.
In short: The fights are mechanically complex but not exciting because they require perfection. The gear isn’t interesting visually or from a gameplay perspective. There’s less content aimed at less people. The game is running on good will alone but even that has its limits.
@ I agree, I was just shutting down the OP's bullshit response of "actually its always like this on downtimes c:" which is objectively not true. We've never lost 1/3 of our active playerbase on a .1 patch, in fact we've never lost players at all in a .1 patch til now
When they decided to have more time between patches, the reasoning was fine ... but they probably should've rethought the order in which to prioritize what came out in the .1 patches after that decision. I suspect if they had moved either Cosmic Exploration or Not the Bermuda Triangle up to .1 instead of holding it until later, a lot more people would feel like they have shit to do.
For some reason they decided to put Hildy, a one-and-done MSQ like experience, ahead of content with actual gameplay.
didnt help the story of dawntrail was a bit meh like i love the music and the vibes but the story felt weird only the end with the crystal really peaked my interest so im curious where patch content goes and if im honest i wish to have the scions over wuk lamat
I think the game is just going to see more prominent peaks and valleys as there is a lack of content for the broad player base to consume, until they change that. IF they change that.
They really gotta push up the exploration zone/criterion/relic grind content early in the expansion. Every x.0 - x.2 patch seems to be like this, but it's a little worse this expansion, likely because of the mixed reaction to the story.
And longer patch cycle, that doesn't help either. Plus, they should've released one of the more grindy contents sooner, either the exploration zone, relic, whatever, that would keep people a bit more distracted. Pushing everything to later patches hurts the game, even more when you need to wait 4,5 months for next patch...
Lucky Bancho looks at things like titles, achievements, and minion ownership to see where most characters are in content to dictate activity. That's all info that can be scraped off of Lodestone character profiles.
Sure, but someone can start the expansion and then immediately drop off, or play the entire way through the current patch and quit before the final quest.
No achievements for those so no way to accurately record them.
some of reason of the drop of players could be:
1. main ascian story is over which a lot loved
2. long patch cycles so people are taking breaks
3. lack of longterm content for us to do while they make and release more content
4. new games coming out grabbing peoples attention (like monster hunter wilds at the end of february)
5. stale repetitive content form, by that i mean, square follows a formula, and while its good to have that as it keeps things consistent, sometimes things need to be shaken up and some players might be tired of the formula remaining the same
When they say it got dumbed down but the devs only focused on hardcore content they mean that the jobs are the simplest they've ever been to physically play but the game's been releasing some of their hardest fights.
The game practically feels like it's run by a skeleton crew that doesn't know how to design and develop fresh evergreen content. You can promise this kind of thing before the expansion's release sure, but when major patches are nearly five months apart waiting an entire year for most people to have something to do is a very big ask. The story being below par for what's expected for this game only shed a spotlight over one of the game's biggest glaring issues.
The problem with FF 14 is that they generate so much money but they don’t put it back into the game but they invest it in games like forspoken and life is strange . Hire more people ! And get a new engine!!
This is my third time being current in a new expansion, so I have seen this happen each time but there are a couple reasons I think it feels worse this time around. At this point in Shadowbringers and Endwalker I was diving back into Eureka and Bozja finishing up loose ends. In Dawntrail I don't really have that. I got my four clears of Eureka Orthos, it's also not a great source of exp to help me level my alts so I haven't stepped foot in there in over a year. I have done essentially everything with Island Sanctuary and the Varient Dungeons. I am interested in Criterion but I rarely see groups set up for that. Another major thing for me is the amount of content promised for Dawntrail, it is pretty stacked and exciting so I was hoping maybe they would be forced into releasing more stuff earlier rather than after the .2 patch to keep an even spread. Technically with Chaotic Alliance raid they did achieve that since it is new content that was promised making this a better .1 patch than normal but it is hardly enough to keep us going into 7.2. That being said I am looking forward to everything we are getting this year as this will be when we get to see most of the content promised for Dawntrail.
I would guess the "dumbing everything down while only releasing hardcore content" bit is about jobs being progressively simplified over the last few expansions while focusing mainly on harder content releases? EW didn't a field exploration zone, people are waiting on the relic grind to release for DT, so I'd guess that's what they're referring to?
It's an odd comment, but what I took from it was EW dumbed things down and geared it towards casuals to a ridiculous degree. Now DT hasn't released a ton of content, and the content it has released has been more geared towards hardcore or experienced players. The big thing to me for DT is the content is an improvement, but they need to stop holding onto certain content for too long.
Spoken like two players who just started endgame. They have no idea what it was like to play in HW or StB
Relic grind? There no grind for that anymore you do your day’s for it its a joke
@sataniaterumi9122 Well, assuming it's connected to the exploration zone again--which, idk if it is--and they're not doing a rerun of the Mandeville Weapons, yes, Rellic Grind. I vaguely remember Yoshi-P acknowledging the process of getting those was a disappointment, so I'm not without hope that they do it better this time.
What I _think_ the guy was meaning in the comments there, is that the storytelling felt more handhold-y(like the flashback scenes to just like 10 mins ago), while the battle-content was a step up in difficulty. Maybe? Feelings are difficult to write down in words imho...
Yea, there were definitely a few of those moments. Toward the end where Yshtola calls Wuk to relay a message to us, the wol, who has had a link pearl since...ARR. just weird decisions like that.
classes got dumb, encounters got more complicated
@@dullahandan4067Exactly this. Not really sure why that was so hard to understand.
I think they expend the patch cycle from 16 weeks to 19 weeks starting from patch 6.1 is one of the things that affects
I do agree the game does need its own steady feed of content at all levels but I feel like "did you shotgun all the content in the first week or did you pace yourself?" ought to be a question people are asking themselves and each other.
Also I enjoy making my own high end raider friends get all shifty eyed when I ask them how their casual content is doing when they complain about the game lacking content. Go ahead, ask an Ultimate Raider what their Doman Mahjong rank is. Or how their Big Fish tally is going.
So what's your point? It's not the players' fault that the content they want to play isn't being updated in time. Some people don't enjoy playing Mahjong, it's a story driven mmo, it's supposed to cater to many different types of players that are in it for different reasons.
@@iferan4166 I guess my point is that high end raid isn't the only content the game's Life should be judge by, as some people I know do. I agree that a wide cast of content is what's best for everyone, but will only ever satisfy as broadly or narrowly as each individual player's taste is.
@@Tazrael I mean true but at the end of the day, ffxiv is an mmorpg, it's an rpg game that multiplier, duh, but, a big part of that is fighting strong enemies right? It makes sense that people would judge the game, at least in a broad perspective, on how endgame bosses look like.
At the same time like I said, it's a story driven too, so the story is a big part of the game....but they messed that part up royally, so another big part of why people are leaving is a crappy story. You could even argue that a lot of what kept people coming back to the game, despite it's flaws were the story, and now that the story is pretty bad it makes the other flaws all the more apparent. It's as if they lost reputation with their player base.
@@iferan4166 fair points all. So, what are you most looking forward to in 7.2?
The game is getting quieter that's to do with the long patch cycle with nothing and the fact Dawntrail is the worse msq in this games history
It's far from dead. In decline, a lull more likely. It might not pick up for an expansion or two. I still enjoy & sub.
.1 patches are usually the lowest point of every xpac, but I think the lack of grindable progression is hurting right now. I'm having a blast with Chaotic and dipping my toes into Ultimate for the first time, but these are not the kinds of content that appeal to the vast majority of casual players.
I think when we get our relic grinds, new explorable instanced zone, and the new island sanctuary in space, things will pick up quite a bit.
What people mean when they say "dumbing things down and only releasing harder content" they mean the class playstyle and content release.
Classes being easier to play (dumbed down) while the only available content is hardcore content.
You could make an argument for the Alliance quest, but those are 3 quests of "talk to an NPC" a day and you are done.
If you are not a Raider, you have nothing to work towards that isn't dailies of going down the one hallway spamming your AOEs. Get to the boss, don't stand on the orange and press your buttons. You are done.
Gearing up is a non-issue, you just buy it. And even then, why are you even gearing up? what does a casual player have to do that they need to gear up for? It's like how people kept telling me they were happy the Manderville Relics were easy so they could gear up their classes but they don't do anything with it. Some defenders didn't even finish ONE relic while I'm left there twiddling my thumbs without a proper grind and missions to fulfill the next step, just another tomestone exchange.
I've been trying to play Black Mage just to keep myself awake during fights. If they dare dumb Black Mage down so you don't have to manage your Fire/Ice switch anymore I will fall asleep. I don't like that they gave us a button so the Ice phase stops ticking down so now I don't need to worry about it.
Less to manage = Boredom (just like they keep taking away my dots in other classes)
I've been enjoying Chaotic (when you get a group for it) but from the looks of it, the content will die and future ones will be dumbed down since people keep failing at it. Too many body checks from my experience.
The extra month of development is being felt for sure, not to mention I was looking forward to PvP rewards but they added nothing past the battlepass ones...
There's too much to go into detail in a comment, but I understand the frustration. The biggest thing right now keeping me subbed is my house I'm chained to.
Edit: One more thing. "Go play something else" or "Play slower" I'm paying monthly for this game, I feel like I should be getting some of that money's worth. I know it's a little entitled, but money and time are being taken here. Not all of us can make a living out of streaming this to thousands of people.
Get rid of your house man, you're just paying virtual rent at this point
Then stop subbing and play other games until new content
@@arosbastion7052 I'd lose my House, Apartment and FC House.
To be honest, it's really feeling like XIV players got a 7/10 for the first time and now the sky's falling.
Chanting "Dead Game" with every dip is just a tale as old as time. Warframe's "died" twenty different times according to its players, TF2 was "dying" for over a decade before it even dropped out of Steam's Top 20, etc etc. I've seen plenty of games *actually* die, and this isn't even **close**.
"But if things continue to get worse-" yeah and if they don't then it'll turn out fine. No need to pile into the lifeboats now just because there's news about an iceberg somewhere out there.
Coming from Destiny 2, this game could be in a WAY worse spot than it is currently. Sure, the story wasn't very enjoyable and felt too predictable and the long content droughts between patches is certainly troubling, but at least it isn't as bad as Destiny 2 where half the content was removed from the game (yes, even paid DLC).
Obviously, I encourange the criticism for the expansion because that will lead to them hopefully avoiding these mistakes a third time. It'd also help if they made classes able to compete with Pictomancer so people wouldn't be excluded from endgame because their favorite class isn't meta. Maybe in 8.0 Machinist will finally get some proper love
A possible reason besides content drought is probably the alliance raid being based around FF11, and during the first week, you have ff11 vets gushing with the memberberries at the references and locations causing people who have not played 11 giving that game a shot. I know half of my fellowship is back on 11 during the content lul right now and i might even give that game a shot as well.
Talking only about duties and rewards in the game...
No ideia about anyone else, but i still have a insane amount of things to do, old things and new.
(Im a Achievement hunter, currently almost getting to 18K points)
the distribution of content could improve, of course, the thing is, it already is improving (not so fast as some pep want but it is) more things to do and rewards were promised in DT and in my opinion (comparing 7.0 / 7.1 to previous expansions like 5.0 / 5.1 and 6.0 /6.1) DT really is a doing a bit more than before.
Field Zones, Relics (probably Tools too), Variant/Criterion, Cosmic Exploration, Deep Dungeons, new trials start usually on .2 patch too, new Blue Mage things are coming and Beast Master too... (Some of those, i wanted a bit early too)
I mean, good for you, but not only is not every content something that interests everyone, the bigger deal is that we already didn't have shit to do in Endwalker post patch lull, and that's when many players cleared out their backlog.
just falsse
TBF, achievement hunters intrinsically always have the most to do. I think this whole thing is crazy overblown and there's nothing wrong at all, but at the same time I wouldn't say your slice of the community having plenty to do is a great indicator of that.
On the flipside, I would say that a subset of the "there's nothing to do" crowd should really give achievement hunting a go. If you can get into it, you'll never run out of things to do.
Third! And before I watch this, I am guessing, no. FF14 is not becoming a dead game, there is just a content lull, it is usually how post-expansion patches are, big new numbers when they first drop and lower numbers the more we get into a expansion, people do what they wanna do and then move on to do other stuff. Hardcore raiders get their raids in and leave, PvPers do their ranking stuff and leave, story players play the story and leave, I think some of the only consistent players are the RP community, it also helps that FF14 has very little in the way of FOMO, sure you can argue seasonal events, but those rewards become buyable from the shop, so not really FOMO there, I do think the only form of FOMO that FF14 has are the seasonal PvP rewards, which only last for the pvp season before fully disappearing forever.
Well the issue is how fast the lull arrived. Normally, the lull happens around the end of the patch cycle but this one started when we’re still early in. The only credit I’ll give them is that there is a massive content lined up but it seems like they’re pushing it much later..?
@@cutejustice I mean, were 2 months into 7.1, next patch is 2 months away and only recently thing released was Chaotic which is not for everyone and closer to Savage than Extreme. No Midcore content to grind out in the lul and people will drop off. Numbers will go back up 7.2 for a month then go down again. happens every Expac cycle.
@EverianKalim Exactly, patch cycles are a lot shorter in FF14 then they are in WoW, and they are also very consistent. So players got the stuff out of the way they wanted to do, there wasn't really 4 months worth of content, but then again, no patch has that much content to hold a player base consistently for the entire lifetime of it, not unless you add a heap of collectibles and timegated content, and we all know how much MMO players looooove timegated content.
That’s me. I leave for like 6 months and then come back and leave again. Too many good games
@@imaran1303the story has been bad since endwalker. Dawntrail suddenly is even worse. It’s the the same ole “content lull”
I mean DT is now 7 months in. There’s no content. They bungled chaotic the way they bungled Criterion and now we are going to get an ultimate before any grindable/exploration content comes out. If the relic content and cosmic exploration flop - which at this point they could? We know next to nothing about them - then DT offered nothing to anyone not into savage and up. Hell I am into savage and even I got bored.
IMHO the game needs to diversify its difficulty. All content for all people sort of thing. The fights need to consider endurance vs performance because their “perfect dance” design philosophy has ran its course.
The game has 2 core mechanics that separate it from competitors: 1) You can be all roles in 1 character. This cuts down on content as a lot of other games rely on leveling and re-doing content for engagement. This is exacerbated by the fact that both game play and core identity have been stripped from the combat roles. Everyone plays the same and there’s no unique path to pursue (I.e. all tanks play the same, have the same gear etc). They need to combat this by giving us unique gearing and class-options. We need armor per job, not per role. Each uniquely designed for that job. Maybe something like job-specific mounts? Something to counter the sameness and to give your one character a reason to do and master different things.
The second mechanic is multiple rezzes. A lot of early FFXIV relied on exhaustion mechanics. You needed to perform mostly well, but could be rezzed and adjust. As such you needed to supply mana to your healers and use your lbs etc. Perfect play design means there’s again only one way to do things, and even 1 death could mean your entire party is done for. Healers feel pointless because you need to be perfect to get by. Messing up isn’t recoverable. So other than heal scripted damage the healer has nothing to do and no unpredictable situations to respond to. This severely undermines what is sold as a feature for the game.
They aren’t doing enough. And what little they are doing is suppressing rather than enhancing what makes the game fun and unique. So yeah players are doing to dip. If you have a chance to do another press visit, this is worth discussing. I wish I could be in the room because I think they’d listened if it came directly to them, but the actual feedback is being filtered out by louder and meaner voices.
Kyle is absolutely right that you can play with statistics to tell just about any story you want. Change the parameters of your data until the numbers resemble the point you want to make. Change the sample size, range of samples, timeframe of samples, region of samples, etc.
I was showing people this when EA announced last year, Sims 4 pulled in 15 million new players. It's really easy to turn that into "Sims 4 had a 50% new player fall off compared to the 30 million they got the year before." It's that easy to reframe figures as a negative or positive.
Unironcally Garrett, you hit the nail on the head to me. People see these patches come out and feel like they need to get everything done IMMEDIATELY then they burn through what's new and go back to bitching about a content drought and it's just like... Maybe the reason there's a drought isn't necessarily because there wasn't a ton added but because you rushed through it and got it all done in a friggin' week in a patch that is meant to cover a few MONTHS.
I get the complaints about there not being much in the patch judging by what I saw in the patch notes because I'm still working through the MSQ right now (I have two characters, one has finished 5.0 and is the character I play exclusively with my partner right now and the other has just finished the Naadam in Stormblood) but at some point people have gotta reflect on things and realise maybe they're not getting much out of the content because they're spending god knows how many hours trying to get it all done so damn fast.
A 300,000 drop in the player count isn't gonna be anywhere near enough of a problem to warrant panic really because chances are a ton of them are coming back for 7.2 when that comes out. It just feels like the internet has to blow everything out of proportion now...
to further add to this 7.2 is a major raid patch which will keep players longer the odd number patches only have ex trials and 24 mans and those don't keep people engaged for long the even patches tend to hold players attention far longer
This is why I always do MSQ ASAP, but any side content, unlocking aether or any non-MSQ content I tend to spread out and take my time with. I would take MSQ slower if I could trust the community to not spoil things. When the game gets slow, I like to casually level side characters too. I know it's not everyone play style, but I tend to like it because I've grown to love past content I used to hate and found new perspectives on current content.
A week? There was barely enough content in 7.1 to last a day. The reality of the situation is that if you've been playing for a while and are caught up, there just isn't enough content to keep people remotely interested in the game.
This isn't a small indie dev. We're talking about the flagship product of a multi-billion dollar company. It's kind of inexcusable.
@@mosley3485 As a endgame player, you either take a long break, find creative outlets, or get into achievement hunting. I know achievement hunting is dull, grindy, and can be somewhat on the unhealthy side, (depending on who you ask) but it'll keep you busy for years. The game becomes overwhelmingly stacked full of "chores" if you ever decide to hate yourself and go down that path. Then you will NEVER complain about drip feed content ever again.
@@thecrowonyourshoulder I'll probably be 100% achievements before 8.0 drops. Then what? Play the game for a couple of days every 4 months? I think a lot of people are starting to question whether it's worth coming back after a break.
It's definitely in a slump. But it's a fairly normal slump. If you don't raid, there is a 9 month stretch from 7.0 to 7.2 when we have a shot at content like Shade's Triangle and Cosmic Exploration. The expansion cycle promises a ton of content eventually but everything is heavily back loaded. In 6 years, a new player will hit the post Dawntrail stretch and have an embarrassment of things to do.
Unfortunately, living in the moment means there isn't really anything on offer for a large number of the players so they're drifting to other things. Once we finally get to more patches they will come back. Right before Endwalker, they increased the time between patches from 3.5 months to 4 months because "The entire team is getting an additional 2 weeks of vacation per year so this is to compensate for the reorganization" and then after dawntrail, they silently slid in another two weeks. this puts us at 4.5 months of dead air between drops.
Though they promise that the 14 team working on 2 other games while developing 14 had no effect on the game! They swear! It doesn't matter if anyone that has ever worked in a similar environment knows that isn't possible but they promise!
The problem with this is that, while people do keep coming back for the patches, the amount of downtime is getting larger and larger and the quality of a lot of content seems to be degrading over time. Eventually we'll hit a point where people don't feel that the content is worth waiting for and will move on permanently. For some people, it seems like that's starting to happen now. Something really needs to change.
Yeah, for me I'm not much of a raider so I skipped 7.1, but I am interested in the cosmic exploration stuff so will likely re-sub for that. It is more than fine as i had a bunch of time to play other games.
@@mosley3485 This. I'm a 1.0 player, so I stuck around even during the game's worst era, because while it was insanely flawed, it *felt* like it was moving into a better direction. It felt like my money and time and effort went towards something, and it felt like the devs cared, tirelessly working to fix the problems we reported, to add the things we missed, to give us something fun and interesting to do.
Right now is the first time ever I'm actually unsubbed, because 7.1 is where I hit my "why should I?" moment. I finished 24 man and ex trial day 1, but then what? Keep spending for the next almost 5 months so I can sit in Limsa and people-watch or something? Doesn't seem worth it.
Was gonna resub for the new hard 24 man at least, but they decided to drop it during Christmas when the majority of the Western playerbase is busy with family, and by now it's basically impossible to find a "from the start" group.
At least I still plan to come back for 7.2 (since I have a static and enjoy Savage with them), but I can imagine some others who don't care for savage might not just go to only subbing once per patch but to just not subbing at all anymore.
I dropped my sub after savage, would have come back for chaotic but it literally came out on christmas eve, sorry I had shit to do ig
Game is so dead that people still can’t travel to aether and specific servers on other data centers
Nice to see some older 1.0 players in here /wave. I am a closed Alpha tester I am almost 15 years playing this March ,Somebody pointed out that I have been here longer than Yoshi LOL. I love FFXIV but the game has changed so much now sadly and the lack of things to do is showing. I tend to duo old content just for fun or catch up on things I never got round to doing like my Card mount that took me years >.< as I did it mostly solo/duo. I miss the old days where we seemed to have more to do and there seemed to be more excitement within the game. I enjoy Island sanctuary but I did not enjoy the DT expansion it was lacking. The lack of hairstyles also not even a free one with the expansion is bad. We have less input from Yoshi these days and the housing situation for players is bad. I am lucky I have one but they should be accessible to all and it is a major fuck up by them when they did it the way did. I am unsure where the game is headed. I have seen it quiet before now and then they will do something to add some excitement which I am hoping they will do. They need to fix the story add more open world content and give the players something back instead of just adding glams to store all the time. PVP frontlines used to be fun they need to fix it somehow and give rewards for players.
This is the first time I've felt like not logging in due to lack of things I want to do. I finished Jeuno and the 5 seconds of mediocre story and... that's it for me. I don't think I could have completed the content much more slowly and had it be coherent at all, and outside of those two things, that's it. I'm not interested in the hardcore/savage content, and I've made peace with that in the past. This time, though, the lull is dragging on forever, and for the first time, I'm also not looking forward to the main scenario stories. The next alliance raid will pull me back in, but eh.
I don't think FFXIV is becoming a "dead game" (how overly dramatic), but it certainly has become more of a "log in once a week for 45 minutes and then log out" kind of game for me.
One thing that has baffled me since the start of Endwalker's patch cycle that I don't think was really there until more recently is the getting upset at the minor patches having little in them and the need to not look at a patch as a whole. Or it's always been there but for me it hasn't been as prevalent in the past vs how it is now. As yes the minor patches are not going to have as much meat on them as the patch as a whole would. Yet there are those who are either being etremely hyperbobolic or truely do expect to recive an enitre patch worth of things to drop even in your .02,.03, .06. If not an entire expansion's worth of stuff.
I do however feel that when and where things release should be shaken up or at least paired better. When I say pair better I'm talking about making content feel as though it is what it's supposed to be. For an example the pelu pelu society quest feels too much as though it should either have been our DoL or DoH quest line as you barely do any fighting during the story line or in the dalies. The same thing you could say about the final desgin of the Manderville weapons as they feell as they should have been the 1st tome weapons of DT if not the ones you got from the Arcadion. Everyone expected the joke weapons you can get now via map rng to have been the final looks or at least the starting looks to the Manderville as Hildibrand and Godbert are meant to be joke characters.
I don't know why they stopped releasing the relic in the .1 patches like they did in ARR and HW. I can only think of two times when people griped about obtaining a BiS weapon during those two relic quests. One was that the ARR relic started off 5 ilvs lower than the one from the raid and people didn't like that what should be their Bis weapon was 5 ilvs lower than the tome or the one you could get from T5 or T9 i don't remember when they chose to boost it's ilv. In HW people thought that their possible BiS weapon could be one from the Daidem that might have been worse than spending a lot of money on a Gotcha game.
The last thing I can think of as to why some might call the game dead is the ones who would complain about the devs not taking time to future proof the game before it reached to the point XI is in. Which is why we see a lot of the solo friendly QoL's happening right now. Course the game has been either dead or dying since 2.3 so what would I know.
There hasn't been a patch 7.2 yet so you are comparing horses to apples when you say DT is in a healthier spot than EW 6.2. Regardless. I happened to enjoy DT (mostly for the dungeons and normal raids) despite the story being a little wonky. The lack of repeatable/"grindable" content early on is a bit jarring given that was a complaint about EW, this time with a focus on the dead-fish that is Chaotic-AR.
FF14 is lucky to have a very loyal fan-base and continues to attract many new players with an enormous amount of fun content, whether those players stick around/return is interesting. It is fair to say that while not "dead", nor is FF14 thriving.
People just wanna freak out, they don't even need an actual reason. And for the ones that are 'legit' worried about the game, I sorta blame the decreased attention span of the average gamer over the years. Yes, there are definitely things that can be improved but that's always been the case. To feel a huge leap in dread suddenly is largely an act of hysteria.
I didn't know there was a freak out about it. Personally I just feel like other games give more exciting things for my time. Maybe I'll come back in a year with more content to do.
I don't think it has much to do with reduced attention spans. I think the problem is that there was so little to do during Endwalker that most people exhausted the backlog of old content, now there's equally little to do in Dawntrail and people have nothing to go back to.
Right. XIV is still an insanely popular game and has an active player count most other MMOs would kill for, even if it has dropped a bit. We all know the moment a new expansion drops it will rise substantially. The game is a lot like WoW in that sense. The key is for them to make it an undeniably good expansion so the retention is higher
I've been playing since 2.0. You're just coping and white-knighting.
@@EldgardHammerheart-m9g I've been playing since 2.0. Whatever you might think about me (which is irrelevant?) the game isn't 'suddenly failing' just because a bunch of people suddenly feel like making a big deal about how they are dissatisfied and want everyone to pay attention to them. Which seems to happen periodically, but in increasingly more extreme demonstrations. This cycle appears to have less to do with the game than the nature of community engagement via social media and streaming.
For my part, it's silly you assume I must be coping. Do you really find it unbelievable that there are still a lot of people who enjoy what the game offers?
There’s nothing casual to do in Dawntrail right now that I haven’t done already. Personally, I have to get into the headspace and allot time if I want to tackle hard content but during times where I want to run current small stuff, ff14 doesn’t provide that. All I do now is log on to do unreal and alliance raid and just leave until the next week.
I really wish they released the beast tamer class right now and did small incremental updates. Alternatively, they should’ve released the supposed Dawntrail bozja early on. TLDR; it’s something for players to do while they curate current content.
Edit: also, I think there’s a bit of dishonesty here when talking about “dumbing things down and releasing hard content being a mistake”. While the statements do clash with each other, the reality of the matter is that 14’s definition of hard content is unfairly punishing. If one player messes up then everyone suffers. They’ve gotten too cushy with body check designs that it makes the content sometimes unplayable because if 7/8 of us are doing the dance right but Jim Bob keeps messing up then we all wipe. It’s discouraging. EX3 made me feel burnt out BECAUSE people continuously messed up on meteors during farming. That’s why I personally have to brace myself for all that nonsense. I wish they just let people die, get rezzed and we continue but here we are.
I don't want them to just let people die, get rezzed and the party continues. That's how you get bad players carried through hard content. That's why there's a huge disparity currently between EX and Savage. In EX, bad players are allowed to be carried over to the finish line while Savage doesn't let you do that.
To be fair, maybe body check design shouldn't exist in EX and I personally haven't touched EX3 (been waiting for my static to get back from the holidays so we can do it blind) so I don't know if EX3 is actually "unfairly" punishing. But there needs to be punishment in difficult content and enough incentive for the player to get better to overcome that.
There's currently no incentive. They''ve tried time and time again to dangle "casual" player rewards like cosmetics and glam in difficult content. Instead of rising to the challenge, the "casual" players complain that the rewards don't suit the content. There's no helping it. Of course they're going to think like this when 90% of the game can be drooled through and the supposed bridge to more difficult content (Extremes) is allowing players to be carried through to get the rewards.
@@Jaxter0987 certainly there are better ways to incentivize people to do better than to wipe a whole party and progression because of one person’s mistake.
Regarding bad players: they are currently sneaking into prog parties right now by lying about what phase they’re in for accelerated progression. Honestly, I don’t care if a player gets carried in an extreme. Especially when it’s a farming party that’s meant to be done over and over again. If a player wants to get carried 100+ times by different people go ahead but Godspeed if people will have the patience for it. Maybe there’s room to discuss where and when it makes sense to have body checks.
@@Jaxter0987I'm good with players being carried a bit because it's four fights at a time and twelve per expansion. If you want a fight that's punishing, do ultimates.
As a bad player, I am tired of funding a dozen savages that demand perfect runs from eight people. Ultimates are at least kind of understandable to have that direction.
It has come to a crazy state where gacha game like Wuwa has more contents to do per patch.
I think some people just play the patch and the msq then stop playing until the next patch. Everyone is different, I still play and still love the game.
I've been subbed and playing since 1.0 beta and for the first time, I just don't care enough to keep subbed. The new story was very underwhelming, the only characters I liked was erenvalt and Otis. The whole tuliolal storyline was just stupid and full of plot holes with very weak character development and I also know that if I just resub after 7.55 comes out I can spend a month catching up on the story and content then quickly be ready for 8.0, if that is even going to be worth it. I remember I didn't like Stormblood but at least I finished it and kept up in Eureka cause that was something engaging. I just don't feel the need to get on the gear treadmill only to have it replaced by the next patch. The only things that might bring me back before .55 would be beastmaster and whatever the "Eureka/bozja" content is, if it's fun and engaging.
same, i played since 1.0 first day, and almost never stopped my sub but dawntrail, i skipped alot of cutscenes what i never did before just wuk here wuk there, after the msq ended i unsubbed lost my house. i dont feel like playing again, maybe when beastmaster comes out. until then its monster hunter wilds for me.
@ruepel15 this expansion is just a huge miss for me. Hopefully the side content makes it worth while but I'm not going to hold my breath. My biggest reason for dropping off is the boring reward treadmill, even as glamor options, nothing appeals. There's no "must have" gear, it's all just timed glamor, the only reason you would need the high end gear is to fight the high end content that you can just walk over after the next patch. Make gear matter again!
Exactly my thoughts. I play since 2.0 and from time to time I pause the resub, but since 7.05 savage I don't see a reason to come back to the game before the next patch (maybe to catch up, if I do come back)
The game focused way too much on casuals, turning the game ridiculously easy during most of the time, keeping the same formula in so many points, nothing interesting new, jobs are mostly like the same thing and sometimes too simple. I liked Endwalker story, but it had too many fillers, though acceptable. Dawntrail is a lot worse, story is not cool, characters are not good, half of the soundtrack is a reuse of old songs.
At some point I realized I can do hell much more with what I used to pay with that subscription.
This time feels different, the player base is aging and you ain't getting newer younger players in because they don't play MMO's. Many of my friends are in their mid 30's now and have just enough time to play a couple of hours before life takes over, and there are so many better stories out there in other games that almost all of them decided DT was not worth it. The base game has soured us enough that none are coming back until next expansion at the very least. By that time they will be much nearer to 40 so who knows if they will ever return.
But don't take my word for it. Just see how it looks like by the end of DT. Apathy is at an all time high.
Actually this might be a major factor in why they're putting out the mobile version and letting those devs upgrade and modify so much.
A large dip in players is normal between updates. Difference between now and shadowbringers time is that the game doesnt have a large influx of players coming in between updates and the negative response to DT..
Behold engagement! I've just set some personal goals in the game and found a chill group of people to do Eureka with. Trying to stack as much Gil as possible before the new exploratory zone comes out. I'm pretty midcore and the last couple years I've been making my own fun, but I can see people who've been playing longer than me to feel the lulls even harder and that kinda sucks. Devs shaking up the content cycle and dare I say it...double down on customizations. The drip feed of hairstyles is kind of a bummer XD I would love some new bangs for existing hair styles. Let's gooooo
We're gonna need Natsuko Ishikawa dressed as Dr Doom announcing her taking over the writing at the next Fanfest to fix Dawntrail's hype. People coming off of Endwalker getting hit with insufferable characters, terrible worldbuilding and contrived situations bounce *hard*
Honestly the only thing carrying the game for me for the last couple expansions was the main story. I just really don't get into savage, and as a launch player I've pretty much done everything else. I've done all the crafting you can do. I've done all the side content you can do. I've done pvp. I've done some Savage and extremes.
And the only thing keeping me going was the main story arc. And when that wrapped up, it was awesome, but I also kind of just lost any interest in continuing to play. The new story lines were fine but I just wasn't invested in them and didn't care that much. I ended up canceling before the current expansion even came out.
Better access to large housing might have helped out for a while but even then you can only do so much.
Game is not dead, just in a lul. But it does not help that for some reason the game actuvely punishes people catching up to content if they arent around week1. Im looking at you, multiplivative first timer bonus on chaotic raid and the shitty savage weekly loot lockout.
As long as the player numbers stays in the black on the ledger, the ups/downs shouldn't be 'doom and gloom',, but instead be great feedback times for CBU3.
For example, I'm still "subscribed" but haven't played much since just before Thanksgiving. I'm in my 50s, 4 kids, a grandson and lots of family. If something big in-game was happening, I'd be playing a bit, but atm, family time is most important.
I'll be jumping on regularly again starting this week... so i guess I'm an "In-acive but actively subscribed player"???
No it doesn't show that DT is a success. We'll see when 7.2 numbers are out. But both SHB and EW showed that it sustained or even gained numbers from x.0 to x.1. DT lost 300k in that span. SHB and EW lost 300k in x.1 to x.2. So will DT fall even further in that timeframe?
i think people are really hurt by how bad the msq was and on top of that there have been other characters that were better than Wuk Lamat that they sidelined immediatly at the mere sence of backlash and this is the hill they want to die on
they also have not innovated anything like at all after 10 years people want some changes specially in the "start of a new chapter" when you label your MMO as a Narrative Driven MMO dont be surprised when people leave when the story is garbage
theres also the fact it takes them so long to bring out a patch that at best gives you 1 week of content wich makes you wonder "wtf are they doing during 4 months ?".
something that i noticed in the live letters is that everytime anything gets sugested that is a QoL the instant reaction on the devs faces is almost in the line of "OH MY GOD I GOTTA WORK NOW ? OH GOD NO", it feels like they dont really play their game anymore and are just going through the motions.
I figured that games have lulls and drop offs usually. For MMOs, it's a bigger deal, and definitely CBU3 may want to consider its patch content for heavy users. I personally have lulls where I go away and try other games and... have a life, where I am learning new hobbies and tackling IRL life/work stuff, so I appreciate lulls in the game and even if the game didn't have lulls, I would go away and do other stuff. TLDR, I think people like to catastrophize.
this is the same its always been in this game people just forget this or its new players joining that are no used to the ebb and flow of this games player counts endwalker was kinda in a weird spot since the massive influx of new players that kinda changed the norm but its just going back to how its always been
I would be interested in finding out what "active" means according to this. The high point of my FFXIV experience was definitively Endwalker, and I heavily played and subscribed consistently throughout Endwalker patches. I personally felt there was nothing lacking in any of that.
Dawntrail, the lowest low of interest levels since I began my experience when Heavensward was out when I initially played, has brought me little to no desire to actively play the game myself. The reason I stay subscribed (on and off) is to keep my housing and not let it be demolished. My interest now has nothing to do with current content, but rather getting my family and friends up to the point of Endwalker's climax, playing alongside them and enjoying their journey with them. Everyone I personally know in my circles are in the same position.
I haven't lost hope in FFXIV, but I do fully feel that Endwalker was a perfectly good ending and I didn't need or even necessarily want anything more from FFXIV beyond that. That is how I mentally resolve Dawntrail and onwards. Different game, different experience, doesn't hit my interests.
@15:56 it's dumbing down of extreme and savage and jobs, and then people only seeing effort put recently into FRU and Chaotic raid.
Traditionally, FF midcore wants harder job options, and harder 3rd/4th floor savage boss.
They don't want to do ultimate and Chaotic raid feels like heroic/mythic wow raiding virus
I also want to say as a person who was subbed since Stormblood, I think most of the issue is there just being a lack of conent in general because we finally had breathing room during covid to do past content. That was honestly the best time to play 14 because so many people were playing so it was easy to get people together for Eureka, deep dungeons, work on relics, older raids and Ultimates, and level up alternate jobs.
By 6.2 I was just bored. The story was not that captivating for me, I did the side content I wanted to do, my friends were not playing at the moment... So I decided to unsub until a month before Dawntrail came out so I could play catch up. Dawntrail was not a fun time for me personally, so I didnt bother with savage when it came out and just came back for patch content. I'll come back if Cosmic Exploration is actually fun.
Play, complete, rest then return.
I'll say the game isn't dead and i'll use the free days they give us to finish the main content and level grind but im only renewing when i want to use those 30 days and work on my Crafting logs
This feels line a click bait video about a clickbait topic honestly, which I feel bad saying but this and the article both don’t need to exist other than to garner views and cause the community to argue so creators have content to cover during patches. We’re in the tail end of a patch lull, its the holidays when people are busy, and start of the year and upcoming titles mean of course people are playing other things at the minute.
HOW DARE YOU BACKSEAT ME!
THE BROTHERHOOD IS OVER!!! 😂
this happens every 2 years lmao my answer is no but the reception of dawntrail was quite concerning to me personally. hopefully we get more midcore content
Reminder, this happens a lot for MMOs,
A game that sells itself on its story first, has a very poor outing with a new writer.
I'll give two annologies. If you over-salt your food it will never taste good, Its often better to under-salt the meal.
Painting a molded out home is not going to fix the problem.
There are structural issues with XIV on the combat side that have taken them 2 patch cycles to fix, they are no where near where the combat should be. They have a massive engine issue that needs to be addressed. While other companies are working to update their engines and future proof their games...Square has chosen to put a timed sunset on XIV. The robbery of XIV's coffers to pay for other games really does harm to the game itself. Then on top of all of this, most of the community feels they were served a salty meal with the 7.0 story.
Playing ffxiv just made me wanna play WoW tbh
As someone who quite ffxiv over how badly SB was written and only came back because of Viera reveal a year later. This is all just so much of an overblown "ffxiv is dead" propaganda from people who forget how bad Stormblood really was. Remember most of the great QoL features that made SB bearable for new players was not there during Stormbloods launch. No you could not solo Eureka on launch and your kit was painfully bad and you couldn't use a mount in Eureka until playing for quite a few days for the normal person. No, SB was not fun to play on launch.
@19:15 Nope not interested. Lost 200 lb since quitting wow.
And no matter who you are, you could lose 2-200 lb if you did the same, the end.
I'm significantly newer to this game than a lot of people watching (joined during EW patches) and still have several allied societies to max out, land/hand classes to max, etc. So I'm good when it comes to daily content even though there's a lull. I'd imagine that if you don't have that stuff to catch up on or you're not interested, then there's not much reason to log on every day right now. Hopefully we get some good repeatable content soon.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem. There wasn't much to do during Endwalker, so people went back and finished off all the old stuff that they hadn't finished yet. Now there isn't much to do in Dawntrail either and people don't have anything to go back to.
Woo only two meaningful content drop per year while SE milks the XIV sub money for failing projects! Weeeeeeee i hate them! 😊😊😊😊😊😊
the games been the game the whole time, if people dont want to play it anymore thats fine, id rather have a smaller community than all the toxic wow players that surged in to raid.
my opinion stayed same from title to finishing watching, is FF14 a dead game? no. is their content normally pretty bare bones in .0 to .1 patch ? absolutely if your not a player like myself who plays for extreme/savage or ultimate.
Shadowbringers/Endwalker/Dawntrial were mainly story, they had odd side quest thing you could do like role quests, Manville etc. but none of the main outside content is there unless your running extreme/savage/ultimate content comes out before .25 or .35 patch... you never get relic weapon or content based item like Bojza or Criterion till .25 patch even island sanctuary didn't come out till 6.2, realistically after you finish the capstone quest, there's very little to do unless you play for the hard content in the game or you go back to grind old achievements/old mounts etc.
is that a flaw in 14? probably, I can see a lot of players who aren't wanting hardcore content and want more casual to midcore content, its evident in my FC where most people have took a break. I've even seen hardcore people dip this expansion as they are bored of the combat loop of easy classes and 8 man locked in mechanics which you wipe to till everyone gets it without a form of recovery.
should people go play other games? absolutely, as someone who made WoW/LoL/OW1 my main games when i was a kid, i missed out on some complete bops of games, FF14 my main game but i always take the time to go appreciate new game releases between my scheduled raiding, taking time out from a game is healthy and needed.
Yeah. I stayed subbed until a month ago this time around because I was actually way more into the game than normally, but personally I've always found the time from finishing x.0 content until around x.2 or so is a no-brainer break time from the game. x.1 is always a few small chunks of content and an msq patch which serve mainly as a short x.0 epilogue and a tease for the much more interesting x.2 and x.3 story. This one was no different. In fact I would argue it was one of the best x.1 patches. It's just that x.1 is always weak so that's not saying much.
Not dead game but the activities are indeed in decline.
I stopped after Shadowbringers during Covid, the fixed rotations and lack of flexibility in character building made it stale for me. The endless glazing of the how the story was basically high literary art by the community also turned me off (it was good for an MMO but nowhere near the best in gaming).
They stacked the early content full of savage and savage-like activities. I don't want to do that and even the best MSQ can't keep people subscribed for a full year.
Best msq?
At this point, I feel it's pointless to talk about this as this cycle has been a thing forever. At least since SB is not HW. The dry patches are just a few weeks longer after EW due to them wanting to give the team an extra few weeks of rest.
I don't want this game to become like other MMOs back in the day, where they drained so much time, that trying other games was near impossible. FF14 easy to pick back up style is enjoyable. And yes, FF14 has problems, but a number of them would at this point need a total rebuilt to csat off the remains of 1.0 code still cursing the game. We can see this with the mobile ff14 alone, due to it being it's own entire thing. Plus you know Square loving to take the money FF14 earns and put most of that elsewhere.
The cycle has never been like this. They changed the patch release cadence from 3 months to 4.5 months during 6.1 and they never front loaded all of the raids and back loaded all of the casual content
Its game journos trying to get attention imo. Game feels like always with queue times etc. Chaotic being pretty high on demand... Right now is towards the end of a patch. Its always low activity around that time... nothing new
No it's not. This happens just about every patch cause people have other things to do and enjoy rather than logging in for doing dailies when it dosent matter when the next patch comes around. Also I know alot of people see Endwalker as the end of the game and have stopped playing either permanently or are waiting till the next expansion so they can breeze through the entire story in a few weekends to see if it's something they wanna invest their time with.
I personally have stopped playing until 7.2 cause I'm in the I have better things to do group and am enjoying reducing my backlog and the extra pay from the overtime I've been doing.
Those numbers will go back up like always.
Well we will see about this in upcoming months, if they are the same then there isn’t much anything to say though
I played it until I needed a break. That happens and the game goes up and down meh.
I have a lot of friends who play it and they all left never gone back they don’t even talk about the new patch
Gearing is dumb just give everyone ilvl 730 without savage
For people that love the game, Final Fantasy XIV seem to be completely infatuated with it ending. Unless they hate it. It's hard to tell sometimes.
Honestly, if you enjoy the game, sub numbers don't matter. Less people playing does not invalidate your enjoyment of it.
If you don't enjoy it, stop playing it. If you have friends in game, if they're really friends, discord and other things exist. If they don't want to talk to you if you leave the game, they were never friends, they are co-workers. If you don't want to leave because you have a house, if that's the only reason you stay, there are many games that allow you to decorate a house and show it off to other people that do a better job at it. If you don't want to leave because you still love it, but just want it to get better, sorry, the game will never you love you back, and you staying will not fix it. You're just going to get miserable and bitter.
If the game dies, it dies, there will be, and are, other games. Enjoy the good memories it gave you and move on.
And if you rejoice, are positively giddy, at any little news that suggests the game is dying, that is an acceptable reaction...for a war criminal. Not for a video game that you played for years and got bored with. Get a new hobby and let go. The game can't hurt you anymore.
Honestly, I think the big migration from WoW back in ShB brought over enough of the doomers from that game to give us this effect. I dropper that game at the start of BFA because of this kind of attitude. Legion was probably the best WoW expansion since WOTLK, but while it was current, half the playerbase was obsessed with ranting about how it was dead.
I came to greener pastures over here and what criticism there was felt like nothing in comparison. Then the WoW migration happened, and all the doomposting happened to kick up a few gears right as the bulk that demographic was getting caught up on their backlogs.
FFXIV rn is boring and repetitive, that's a fact! Been tha same way since SB and some of the stuff come from HW. Been there since 2.0.
no
The boring story could simply be skipped but the attrocious job design decisions that plagued the game since EW, i.e. murdering Arcanist class, consequently turning SMN into a 1-button snoozefest, making SCH discount WHM, removing pet mechanics, making BST a limited job, tanks having access to very strong healing, among others, have killed any enthusiasm i have left for the game.
Everybody should quit to send a message!
I have unsub in ffxiv this last 2 months, there are just good games released this later quarter of 2024, played a lot of space marine 2 and now path of exile 2, im also playing wuthering waves right now a gacha game. its not that dawntrail is bad i just wanna play some more games beside ffxiv and I dont have enough time to sub and play ffxiv everyday.
This, I was almost nonstop subbed to FFXIV for about two years but now I’m taking some time to play other games. Also just not in a place to be paying yet another subscription.
This was a bad expansion and due to the way FFXIV is, new player will be forced to play through it or pay to skip it.
Why are people so concerned with subscriber count? I understand from a business perspective why they want as many players as possible but from a player perspective more players isn't always better. The FFXIV community was great even when it was a little bit smaller.
Because a lot of content creators (not these guys obviously) have benefitted greatly from growing and feeding a doomer population in the playerbase, who have been convinced for years that the game is dead and it's all ruined now, unless we like enough video essays or scream loud enough on Twitter.
And that was without any evidence to back their claims up. Now they have a number going down, so they're all vindicated and confident that the entire playerbase is about to drop the game.
You may as well ask why subscriber count is important for a subscription based game.
Is it hard to subscribe for the game? I would say yes. I mean, XIV does having this problem not just one update or two. This has persisted since HW to SB and recently changes in EW to DT.
You can look up all the changes happen cause the amount of ppl in game right now it definitely lower than normal patch cycle
People are baffled by an MMO that respects your time. This is normal for FFXIV. People stop playing so they can play some other things before the next expack.
Thank you. People are still so WoW-pilled. Not a knock against WoW, but the skewed "normal" it established. People feel like if they aren't logged in with the 24/7 HIGHEST PLAYER COUNT then the game is dead to them. I get wanting more to do in the game, but quality BUG FREE content takes time. CS3 has decided they will take smooth, predictable launches with a schedule that respects their employees and casual players time to experience other games. Yoshi-P does not want people to be FFXIV-only players. But if you try to tell people "play something else" they say "but i don't wanna play something else" BUT THAT'S A YOU PROBLEM. It's not FFXIV's job to give you ENDLESS content. The world already has that. The loudest complainers are content creators because they've made FFXIV their job...when it specifically isn't meant to be a job. All due respect to the GG duo. Though, I think they've been around enough to weather this.
Such a cope and excuse I've heard countless times to shield S.E from their low energy efforts.
this happens every expansion some one brings up dropping numbers but we growing over all every year its disingenuous and misleading thanks for coving it the right way
It doesn't though. If you look at the Lucky Bancho report, it specifically shows that the % drop off post 7.0 is exponentially greater than that of any other expansion.
@@mosley3485 greater, yes. Exponentially? I don't even understand what you would mean by that here.
@@normalmighty The decrease in players has been larger and faster with each Dawntrail patch, i.e. exponential.
Are you perchance in an FC? Did you check game FCs for active members?
Do you perchance owned a house? Did you require to subscribe of sort?
If not, then that really happen though. I don’t doubt what ppl are saying because it has been like this since EW. There was a surge in DT but that the ppl from HW and SB that getting back to the game and now they leave again.
"How Wuk Lamat killed Final Fantasy XIV" 😉
The worst character ive had to experience with Nimbus from Destiny 2 at second place.
Hopefully they do as usual, enough backlash and Wuk lamat is left eating tacos in the main city of the expansion to be seen again in the expansion that will end this storyline ;)
The trend comes up every time there is a lull of any kind and some how this topic pops up. It had one big long cycle of this for End Walker and a small one after SB. All I can say is people are cont. to level their chara, new players are coming into the game. and older players are on farming . I do know some who left but that had to do with money issues,
It kinda is though. I see the same people non stop
I'm one of those 'active users' that dropped off. Subbed since SHB, unsubbed after finishing the Dawntrail MSQ... dont plan on coming back till the next expansion if they don't drop the ball again
DT is beyond saving, started out bad and subsequent stuffs will be built upon a weak foundation. They have 8.0 to save it, if it happens.
this is normal subs dropped to like 200k during stormblood
I started playing during Stormblood and remember how empty my server was (you could just wander up and buy a house!), so I extra haven't noticed a 'decline' yet, yeah. :P
Not really that normal though, you can get 20-40% of your playerbase to drop a game but not 50% to 70% since that can be a sign that the game isn’t doing well
Morning all o/
I don't understand people who complain about a content drought and remain subbed. Before you bring up the argument about housing, the number of players who own a house is a huge minority, much lower than the seemingly high number of players complaining about a content drought.
Literally unsub from the game and come back next patch. I have people in my static with whom I attempt week 1 Savage clears with literally unsub once the tier is cleared. They're not interested in much else the game has to offer, even 7.1 content didn't bring them back. They're simply playing other games until 7.2. Why can't more players understand this?
YoshiP understands this and has expressly told people to play other games and unsub in the mean time if you feel burned out. While its not the exact same message, the point stands. If you're unhappy with 14 right now because there's no content for you to enjoy, just unsub and play other games. Come back next patch when there's content you enjoy.
How can you say "I don't understand" and then immediately follow that up with "before you bring up".
Stop being pedantic, there's thousands of players with houses who feel like they're being held hostage by their house.
I mean, it's clear they aren't talking about people with houses? House owners are a very smaller percentage as they said. There's a limited number of houses per server and a multitude of *other* people who don't have that excuse. @@BaithNa
I think what you are missing here is other games are not FF14. Suggesting to unsub and play other games is good, if you want to play other games, but it is useless if you want to play FF14 and are faced with the fact, that you completed everything that you were interested in. Now that by itslef wouldn't be a problem, as no dev team can produce infinite new content, but it becomes a problem when the new content they bring in doesn't last long enough to satisfy people.
Anyone getting defensive or failing to acknowledge that this game is NOT in a hospital bed at the ER is in denial and delusional. Wake up. But idc that much. Just here to vent negative feelings and been done with this game for a couple years now. Can’t believe some of you have been following this game like a sheep since beta.
My problem is you can't even get good discussions of Dawntrail going, at least in the places where I've frequented, because inevitably some quarter-wit storms in and goes "WUK LMAO BAD DEAD GAME" and that's all that you ever hear.
They kinda did that to themselves by making her >90% of the story.
Most of these number useally come back at the .3 or .4 patch when there more content to keep them busy