FFXIV Online Community seems to be dying?Follow

You're obviously not on the XIV Facebook group. It's a hundred times more active and a thousand times worse than the official forums, in terms of inanity and trolls.

I think it's that newbies to the Internet and online gaming never got the hang of forums as a superior method of communication.

General Interest is dying out and people are getting bored (whether you want to admit it or not or remain delusional) but that's expected to happen when people are through the most of content they want to clear after a patch and waiting for the next patch.

So it'll pick up when 2.3 hits, then die out while everyone is waiting for 2.4 unless 2.3 is a massive change in direction.

Avg gamer will easily get bored with this game in a time frame of months...not years. I find it just RETARDED how they have repeating primal battles. I unsubbed seeing a very very "dull" pattern emerging for gameplay/content. Rather be outside doing something better.

They might have the same arena and boss but the fights are vastly different from each other. I think its a smart way to add in extra content instead of making only 1 new fight.

As for the game getting "boring"... I am starting to log in less. Thats my fault i suppose. Almost all of my classes are full 90 making coil and soldiery farming my only means to progress. I log in now to help out FC mates or do some dailies. I always look forward to tuesday night since its my groups coil night.

I do wish they would add more end game things to do for those of us who are that far. With constant vertical progression were only going to have coil to do every week. And im usually capped and finished coil on the same day.

Ffxi (yes i know its been out for years) had a great system with there being many end game things to do. I hope ff14 eventually has that sort of variety.

In addition to the shine from the new paint being gone, there have been significant changes in online communities across the MMO genre, too.

Back in the "olden days" (like five to 10 years ago), forums such as ZAM were the places to go for discussion and information. Now, most games launch with official forums, complete with dev trackers, dev interaction, server forums and more. This greatly changes the landscape of online communities for MMOs.

Also, games these days don't require as much talking. They're not as hardcore, and events aren't the logistical nightmares they were just five years ago. Gone are the days of multiple 50-member linkshells for specific endgame events. Endgame just isn't as complicated anymore. There's less reason to talk in game, and even less of a reason to talk out of game.

Also, players are different. Gamers used to settle into an MMO and stay put for years. Now, an increasing number of gamers drift from game to game (many developers have made it easy by creating "no-risk" F2P titles). It's the difference between finding a sense of community in an apartment building vs. a cul-de-sac.

Not to mention that bigger communities implode into black holes for trolling. My personal feeling is there's been a decline in online etiquette over the years, which is really saying something, because it's not as if Internet forums were ever gleaming beacons of humanity to begin with.

Edited, May 30th 2014 3:55pm by Thayos

Ffxiv was the only FF I've skipped watching cutscenes and boring walls of text. The "story" was just non-existant for me. The CSs were merely watching a NPC jaw japping about somebody needing a "heroic" warrior to kill a random underleveled mob(s). I found myself always waiting for the one epic cutscene spewing with a feel of darkness and pure evil that I never really did get a sense for. I feel FFxiv favors Top Notch Gear without getting any kind of rememberal storyline- which is what FF is known for. To me this game feels like just a race for top gear with nothing to do with it after the fact. Sort of a rinse and repeat with each update... "All dressed up, with nowhere to go" feeling.. Only hope would be an expansion in my eyes.

It just means he'd get his *** kicked, but I can see the.. misinterpretation

Lol, I've totally never heard that before, but I almost choked on my dinner when I read it and couldn't stop laughing for a few minutes. Yep, I'm 32.

Edited, May 30th 2014 7:42pm by BartelX

I don't think the game itself is losing steam. Siren server is always busy at about the same rates and times. A little less than at launch, but that's more from the short-timers having moved on. I don't think the servers are having underpopulation issues of any kind, in fact maybe the opposite. The game world is very healthy, IMO.

It just saddens me to see the online forum component of the community being such a graveyard.

Is FF14 dying too? I thought we had a biweekly funeral for 11 back in the the late 2000s...

You guys are forgettng that the reason people stop logging in or playing isnt -entirely- because there's nothing left to do.

It's in a large part due to FFXIV's endgame (and now also dungeons) being so toxic and elitist that it just sucks out all the fun of playing. Rediculous requirements and rules people dont live up to themselves. People being shunned from fights. People being told to only do things one way and not the way they would like to do it (speed running opposed to just doing a dungeon), etc.

All these things just suck the fun out of it for a lot of people. While before, even if something was hard, it was fun to do because people kept trying, cheering each other on, and eventually succeeding. Now it's one wipe, and either people leave, people get kicked, or there's a 2 hour shouting match in town about how much person A sucked because person B couldnt keep him/her alive.

Seeming they prioritized upgrading the login servers, that last one isn't even a concern. It took three seperate server upgrades to get the logins where they were.

Also, those windows do open and close quite frequently. On Balmung, there is a window that opens up at the low point of the mornings for log-ins and it's sporadic as to when they were for the times.

RMT is a revolving door, and if they were the primary issue for the login problems, all severs would be having trouble.

If anything, the 'oh no, it's not because the game is popular' counterpoint only has one solid argument, and it wasn't the ones you were giving. It can also explain the lack of log-in queues - There's no Auto-Logout timer. People are just staying on, not so much traffic going through the log-in server. But the more number of people just leaving their characters logged in, can explain the fact that the population doesn't dip enough for people to log in.

But, even with these factors considered, for all the arguing back and forth about the life of the game, remember we are over tipple the expected launch load and growing. If the intended entry number for success was 400k, and we're getting 100k over that in peak consistent logins daily, in a game where people are complaining they only log in once a week!?

No way is this game even remotely in danger. They could survive a significant decline in subscription numbers and still be above their intended success numbers.

That said, it would be smart to keep as many as they can, and to do that, they're going to need a broader game all around. Some redistribution of workload to do so will pay in dividends later on.

Edited, May 31st 2014 11:55am by Hyrist

They go hand in hand, because one affects the other quite a lot of the time. If your community is absolutely ****, it makes it a ton easier to dislike the game or dislike certain direction etc. Likewise if the game is terrible in one area it'll affect how people are and thus furthers the degradation of the online community because they don't care and thus make lives miserable of those who do care.