Blizzard: Here's a new seasonal mount tied to the 6 month subscription
Players: LOL fucking Blizzard with their Pay2Win cash shop and forced scarcity causing FOMO whales to buy everything on their store!
Squeenix: Here's a new seasonal mount that we're taking away in a month but you can buy it on the store later
The same fucking players: Thanks Squeenix, I'm so glad I have the opportunity to buy things after they go away. Please continue to release products like this so that I can continue to buy them from you later. You guys are totally unlike Blizzard!
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Ah, good thing you have access to Blizzard's internal data and were able to find out, equivocally, that 25% of their MAU losses came from WoW.
Yeah, there definitely isn't boosting in FFXIV.
Oh, and it's not like you can literally spend $25 to skip an entire fucking game's worth of content. But no, WoW token BAD; FFXIV GOOD!
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The dude you were replying to clearly mentioned WoW. If anybody's trying to move goal posts, it's you.
My apologies, i was unaware that "The Devs at Blizzard" was only referring to the wow dev team, and all other "devs at Blizzard" are excluded from the conversation.
The conversation is about the perceived negative reaction to these changes and additions, and if you have followed the conversation at all, many MANY people responding are talking about Blizzard as a whole, the mistakes they have made, the problems they have caused, the poorly received products they have released / announced (OW2, Immortal, War3:refunded).
OW2 is a strange one - at first even I was quite excited by the announcement - especially the focus on coop-pve content, as thats something a small group of friends i play with really enjoy. But the longer it drags on, the more it looks like an expansion at best - major patch at worst. Nothing about OW2 tells me it is a sequel, and that is quite concerning for me. I have seen many say the same/similar things.
Because here ppl come to bitch. To find the bad in every post. It's a hobby a lot of ppl have on the Internet. Doesn't matter w hat it is, if you want to complain you will always create a reason.
The complaining reasoning is pretty easy:
- even if this is good, this doesn't fix these other bad things
- even if this is good, it is very late
- even if it is good, it should have not needed a fix to begin with
- even if it is good, it will affect new players or whatever
And other veriations.
People complain because they like complaining. And it is very rare they just take things as face value and think "is this good for me?" Most of the time it's "can i find a reason to be unhappy about it / to point out its flaws etc?"
So you dont see a pattern at all? You dont see Blizzard announcing core features to an expansion, and then receiving a lot of very accurate and well articulated feedback with major flaws in the system, only for Blizzard to push forward with it anyway. Months down the track, the start to accept the feedback was right, start making minor tweaks, before eventually "giving in" and making the changes the players requested during alpha/beta. Then, in the final patch of the expansion, the game peaks and is really enjoyable for a few weeks.
You dont agree this has happened in Legion, BfA, AND SL? Or you dont believe it is a problem? I also find it really amusing that for some weird reason, you preface every complaint with the assumption that all complainants think the content is "good"? Just showing your extreme bias, to be honest.
Sorry, I just find the criticism of "DAE MAUs DOWN" to be fairly impotent because it lacks any real substantive information for us to draw any actual conclusions from. It's just imaginary numbers players use to support extremely weak positions about the current state of Blizzard's games. It's irritating to see the same three or four talking points regurgitated in every single thread when it's plainly obvious these are people who watched a few Bellular/Asmongold YouTube videos and have absolutely zero critical thinking skills.
Its Blizzards own data - its not "imaginary" numbers at all - its hard factual data, data Blizzard themselves rely on when reporting to shareholders. Are you honestly suggesting they just "make up" those numbers? Its literally the number of people playing their products, and it has been in a steady decline for 5 years.
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I wouldn't get into an argument about which is "better" or "worse", but i will agree it is quite different.
You don't know which products are doing well. You don't know which products are doing worse. You don't know how many new players each product is bringing in. You don't know how much each of the products are losing. You are looking at one single piece of data (the number of players overall) then making a single deduction without any real idea what the information you're quoting actually means. Sorry I don't find these types of arguments to be particularly compelling because I'd rather discuss ways the game can improve than make baseless statements about why I feel like my opinion is somehow more weighted because MAUs went down.
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Lmfao, is this where we pretend people don't buy Gil in FFXIV either?
Discussing MAUs has always been a waste of time. These are far more vague than subscriptions ever were and we don't even know which game they're really tied to. Doesn't matter if it's WoW vs FF14, Classic vs Retail or general "proof" that WoW is dead. Plus, let's not forget that we have no idea about FF player count either - they never reported those and I only recall some "X million accounts created" milestone, which was conveniently "misunderstood" as sub count... and it was long time ago anyway. Or their more recent "we ran out of digital codes", which seems more like a marketing gimmick to me.
I have my issues with the game (and maybe some ideas from FF that I'd like to see here... like plot that isn't garbage or housing or crafting), but whenever I see "MAU", I can tell there's going to be some bullshit posted.
I'm not using it as a comparison to ff or any other game, I'm using it to show a steady decline over Blizzards products, and that cannot be debated. Interesting that it is accepted by the shareholders and governing bodies, but not acceptable to "fans". I would love to go through post histories and see how many have used it previously to show how well classic did, or how well x product is doing, but then reject it as a measure when used to show a steady decline.
There will always be people trying to cheat but there is a massive difference between selling players the gold and refusing to police your lfg system at all and having half a dozen bots...
As for the story quest skip. It's not something that bothers me they give you a buff to be invincible during them. It's a hell of a lot better then server transfers.
Blizzard isn't policing their LFG system? Is that why they just recently changed the level requirement to list groups in the LFG? Is that why just last year they dismantled an entire boosting community for RMT? (One which, ironically, Method admitted they used in the Ny'alotha RWF.) Could Blizzard do more? Sure. But let's not pretend FFXIV is some magic paradise free of all the same problems that WoW has. You're fine to prefer one game to the other; my criticism is mostly of people who refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that they're being somewhat hypocritical when they praise one game for the same fucking thing they criticize the other of doing.
The legitimacy of MAU was questioned - i explained that it is acceptable by all governing bodies as a measure, and the shareholders accept it, and both those points are relevant when discussing the legitimacy of MAU as a measure.
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My main criticism of FF leveling is ironically one of the best things about it - the story. Yes, its quite well done, and yes, its expansive and very involved - the problem comes from FORCING players to complete the entire MSQ, including the dungeon and raid parts. This results in an awful lot of travel quests, like, a LOT of travel quests - sure, once you hit around lvl 30 its just port here, click, story, port to next location, but it can take hours and hours to work through some of the stories.
Im totally fine with having stories like this but to force everyone to do it just to get to the current content is quite silly tbh.