Did Square just accidentally give out player numbers?Follow

I really think that total hours stat is completely borked. Even if it did account for 1.x hours -- which I don't think it does, seeing as this is for ARR's 2-year anniversary -- not enough people played 1.x (or put in that many hours) to make any kind of sizable dent compared to how hours are accrued now.

I'd assume you're being sarcastic because technically...the only thing from WC3 that isn't in WoW is the RTS gameplay and in the case of ARR+, a lot of 1.x gameplay elements and assets still remains in it, so s/he wasn't incorrect since like WC3/WoW, ARR+ is after 1.x as well but with the added benefit of having a previous version to build its content base on.



Actually, it picked up steam pretty well (not "successful") to the point it would actually factor in. The only time it died down was after the final save and the "free" period they brought servers up during betas. He stated about 45-60k+ people were playing 1.x during the P2P period, that's still plenty to actually factor in when those characters got transferred over since they can keep that data recorded but they never display it till census. Like with XI and the adventurer program, they have the moogle pull up those values for us.

Yup, let's keep that out of this thread. Both arguments are described in detail in the other thread.

That said, even when 1.23 hit, the game was still not heavily played. 40-60k sounds about right, but unlike now, many people didn't play daily and didn't play many hours at a time. There just wasn't much to do and the game was very cumbersome. Nothing in 1.x was really designed for casual gameplay.

Edited, Aug 25th 2015 7:56am by Thayos

Guess it depended on your server because I seen plenty playing daily and on for just as long if not longer on my server because people were still farming Garuda and Moogles and if you were on the 'higher end' raid wise people were farming AV and CC. It seemed less mostly because the display limit of players were also very low so you didn't even know if someone was in front of you some times.

I was really lucky in 1.xx to have selected one of the more populated servers and fallen into favor with the leader of one of the few very dedicated linkshells on my server. They were always online and willing to help me. They were the ones to help me get my first job to 50. One of the most challenging and memorable boss fights in all my MMO experiences was The Raven Nevermore. It took me forever to finally defeat the White Raven in Hard Mode. I keep wondering if SE would ever consider a reprise of this fight in the game. It would be totally different now with all the changed abilities.

We had some really good discussions in those days about what makes a good MMO. The speculation about what SE would do really kept me coming back.

Edited, Aug 25th 2015 12:48pm by kainsilv

Honestly feels just like speculation to me. You might be right, but I could say the complete opposite as well which was honestly my experience with it. The people who stayed in 1.x were for the most part a lot more hardcore than ARR players so they naturally spent more time in the game. As for nothing to do the relic made up a lot of the playtime for people around me. There were several things to do, usually it just took more time, people and/or preparation than it does now in ARR so unless you had time enough to do those there was not much to do besides like farming or w/e, but if you had time there was plenty to do. Like you say though even if there were 80k (I honestly doubt it) that played pretty much all the time the numbers still don't add up so.

Really, that depends.

I can see why hardcore players may feel less of a need to be logged in now, because ARR has very little hardcore content. However, for casual players, there's a lot more to do on a regular basis. Sure, many casual players may not play for six hours per night, but the in-game hours add up when a larger number of people spend two hours in game rather than none.

Overall, far more people play the game now than in the 1.x days. Of those, more people have stuck with the game, which ultimately translates to more hours spent in Eorzea.

I don't think it's ever been as low as 500k. At one point (after the game's playerbase settled down post-launch), Yoshi-P said there were at least 500k players who played daily, but he also said there were significantly more subscribers if you included others who logged in less often.

EDIT: Here's an interesting population thread on reddit. I'm not sure of what criteria was used, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/33cc1k/latest_lodestone_population_survey_730k_active/

I'm still getting server queues just about every day I log in, so at the moment I think we're on still on the higher end of the playerbase arc

Edited, Aug 27th 2015 8:23am by Thayos

Well SE hasn't been crystal clear about subscriber numbers in a long time... but it's also no secret that XIV's population continually ebbs and flows along with the big content patches, and the expansion either brought in tons of new players or brought back lots of old ones.

I found a reddit thread claiming that Dragon Quest X had 300k subscribers. That leaves nearly 200k subscribers unaccounted for (based on that article Nash posted). I haven't played FFXI in ages, but from what I've read and heard, I'd be surprised if XI had that many subs at the end of last year. So there may still be a bit of a disconnect between what SE is trying to share vs. what the western media wants to know (in the past, Yoshi-P has been more eager to share subscribers who play daily rather than total subscriber numbers... wouldn't surprise me if that's the case here, although the difference might just be 600k subscribers instead of 500k, so not a substantial shift).

EDIT: Found a BG thread from last May in which a user posted an estimated active user total for FFXI pulled from FFXIAH -- just under 120,000 users. Not too shabby. If we assume that FFXI had an additional 20k users in late 2014, then we still have about 50k users unaccounted for. I'll give 30k of those to XIV and 20k to Dragon Quest X. That means it's very reasonable for SE to say at the time the game had around 500k subscribers, with the true total (not including Chinese customers) being somewhere around 530k. Of course, that 530k may inch closer to 550k if XI didn't lose that many members since late '14... I'm just speculating it did, based on today's FFXIAH active user total of 105k players in XI (still impressive, given that the game is being put to pasture).

Pretty cool though that between late 2014 and April 2015, the population seemed to jump by an estimated quarter million. I definitely noticed an influx of players as the expansion drew closer.

I think this is why the "5 million registered accounts" number is so important, even though a lot of people dismiss registered accounts as being trivial. But a registered account in XIV is someone who paid to buy the game and, at one point, paid at least one month to subscribe. In the business world, these are more than just registered accounts; these are sales leads. The fact SE has instant access to 5 million interested customers (who already own the client) is, in my opinion, a big reason why SE can create an expansion and instantly regain a few hundred thousand subs.

Edited, Aug 27th 2015 9:57am by Thayos

This is why the issue I have with this is that you get minions pretty quickly, even sub 20 (main story). So the data collection is a bit weird but it's the only way to get it as SE definitely won't come out with official numbers. Last word was in a gamewatch interview where he said "about 100k active subs per server."

I'm guessing he means data center, which would put the population at 600k.

However, as I pointed out earlier, Yoshi-P tends to focus on "daily players" when discussing active subs, just as he did last year when he said the population was 500k (he elaborated the count would be much higher when considering those who play once every two or three days). I think 600k daily players and 730k total subs sounds about right.

Nvm, posted after your edit!

Edited, Aug 27th 2015 12:47pm by Thayos