Newest unofficial census numbersFollow

These lists obviously show characters, or alts above level 21 who have had any changes to their profiles over the last month. These aren't subscriber numbers, you have to make an educated guess to those. I would guess 2/3 of the numbers would be subscribers but it's just a guess.

January 9th 2015: 771,103 active characters
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/409tbr/lucky_banchos_eorzea_census_updated_jan_9th/

April 20th 2015: 639,585 active characters
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/4fnvnr/unofficial_census_time/

Seems they lost 131,518 characters over the last 3 months, which mirrors the last large drop in players noted in the progress report.

Would be interesting to know the actual subscriber numbers, guess we will never get those though. If I were to take my guess of 2/3 then it would be just over 426k subs, which is pretty good still.

Edited, Apr 22nd 2016 5:27pm by Runespider

Yeah, I'd also guess around 500k subs right now, especially as we're entering the patch lull where most players have had enough time to deck out a job in tome gear.

And wow, look at those low clear rates of A4S... not even 100 people cleared it on my server of nearly 14,000 people. Is it really a surprise the population fluctuates so much with each patch cycle?

This game needs an endgame that players can actually get engaged in.

Edited, Apr 22nd 2016 4:31pm by Thayos

double post apparently.

Edited, Apr 22nd 2016 11:42pm by Montsegurnephcreep

I don't think anyone is saying the sub loss/gain is based on hardcore end game content alone. I just think the variation of end game, whether it be hardcore or midcore needs to significantly vary. Short of the relic quest line, there's no real long term goals, and even then, that weapon is obsolete within a few months. For me personally, I got to the point of, why bother, I'll just be doing the same thing with a new skin in 2-3 months.

Yeah. In the current endgame everything is either incredibly easy or incredibly hardcore. The problem is that the vast majority of players are looking for a middle ground that doesn't exist. Us "casuals" who still want a challenge but don't have the time, inclination, or skill to do savage level raiding are pretty much out of luck.

This genre really needs universal terms with generally accepted definitions.

Endgame to me is anything available only to max level(whatever the current cap is) players. I reserve 'hardcore' for the part of that content that is tuned for more skilled play. Most endgame is aimed at the general population. Hardcore content is aimed at a part of that population who should already know that the difficulty is proportional to time invested, skill required, ect.

We all know that Yoshi and his team are incredibly talented, but knowing that they're still struggling to support the content they have; why would we expect them to be able to develop a 'midcore' content without sacrificing time needed elsewhere? Besides, from everything I've heard a 'midcore' player simply wants alternative content that's easier and more accessible than hardcore raiding but they wanna keep the hardcore rewards. That wouldn't work well.

Yeah, seems like we've gotten the, "Casuals ruin EVERYTHING!" out of the way.

Do we really need to rehash the whole conversation about you looking at the game through the hardcore lens? Because there's a good chance your perception of standard is going to wildly differ from those who at least mentioned midcore content.

What I was more abjectly ribbing at was what Filth said:

The bolded to be met with a simple question of, "Why wouldn't it?"

Okay, let's dance again.

- People who don't like raiding, but want the loot are no longer forced into it.
- Those who do like raiding lose bodies, potentially making it harder to field the content they do enjoy. Yet this has the effect of truly determining who actually likes the system as is.
- I would argue that turning a game into an obligation with the whole scheduling and politics that follows is both not for everyone and implicitly unhealthy for the community at large. A bunch of little cliques, what MMOs tend to be within the games themselves, does not a true community make.
- We can mention minority completion rates of the hardest content, introducing the question of why it's a focal point of development, and a costly one at that. Too late there, I suppose.
- We then deflect to mini-game shenanigans, when they're not really the root of what MMOs are: Combat systems and generally unrelated to the midcore of intelligent casual's desires. Being artistically minded, I'm not going to call people who like vanity content or things like housing dumb, either. I just acknowledge they're not directly tied to combat.
- More on rewards, however, people wind up being labeled undeserving, lazy, underskilled, lowest common denominator, entitled whiners, or whatever if alternatives came to be. Ergo, casuals ruining everything because how DARE they get stuff doing what they like even if what they like doesn't match some nebulous standard of worth that should ideally require 20+ people minimum who meet a few nights a week for a number of hours. At the very least, we're attempting to link combat to combat-related rewards.

Whatever standard you believe in at the moment, however, the current MMO scene of 2016 is crap. What we have are a bunch of games out there where roughly 10% of their given populations like to lord their so-called skill and knowledge over the remaining 90%, both to influence their behavior (read a guide, watch a vid, follow instructions, don't deviate or else you're noob) and that of the devs (we don't need X because we're the more "important" demographic). This comes at the cost of accessibility, imagination, and bluntly, good will. MMOs shouldn't be caste systems, but that's pretty much been the "standard" for over a decade now. Some try to dress it up, but when you peel away the layers, the ugliness is still there. Why? Well, I guess we've convinced ourselves bad things would happen if we strayed.

Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome. Maybe we've all got a bit of ********* in us. I dunno. Me calling out the MMO scene isn't to implicitly knock on anyone who does like a given game. I'd just hope they stop to think, "Could this be better?" and if they answer yes to that question, would the how be rooted in selfish whim or for the overall benefit of their peers? A little greed isn't bad, mind, but we really need to stop trying to keep players from things solely to elevate the worth of said things. MMOs simply aren't a proverbial Round Table in their current iterations.

FFXIV is a progression based game.

Your characters power in FFXIV comes directly from the item level of your gear.

Higher level gear should come from content that requires a high level of execution.

I honestly don't care that the gear comes from outside of raiding. My major issue in all of this is that the gear is a reward for having a heartbeat. We used to have to work for nice things and it made us appreciate the effort we all put forth. It was rewarding in more ways than just a higher number on your armor and a stat buff. Most people I know have more respect for things they worked hard to get. It's a rather simple concept.

Actually **** it, you're right. Loot pinata sounds much more interesting

The only senior staff I know it's working there from XI is Komoto (CoP director, 1.0 pre-yoshida story director as well as 1.0 Producer). As for other staff, there may be.

A side note too, following along the lines of content you enjoy vrs content you are forced to do.

Let's go back to that 0.6% completion rate on Balmung.
I want to recall an important point - Balmung is FFXIV's top Roleplaying server, it effectively the unofficial RP server of the game. This is perhaps the largest reason for the disparity, between alts never touching the content, and players who are more interested in easy-to-complete content that does not conflict so heavily with their RP time.

If we are to take this into account, this is further evidence that more players feel that they enjoy content other than hardcore raiding, than the hardcore crowd. SE has one of the largest populated servers in their game with next to no interest in raiding as it's displayed now.

I'm on a patient but cautious wait and see for the new Deep Dungeon. But if it's done decently, it could easily overtake raiding as popular content, save for the continuing to deplete numbers of hardcore raiders who will snuff their nose at the lack of BiS gear.