Feels like WoW has more players again

[Miriamel105]

Looked at the FF14 stats, it had 7.4M at 1 point in 2021. No fucking way indeed.
But i still don't get it where people manage to pull all numbers from how WoW has no activity since Blizzard is the only one that knows. Where do they pull all these info from.

Even more obvious was, when MMO population said it got over 34M created accounts, while Square itself celebrated 24 millions.

And of course selling 100% dead game with no running servers at all as still active.

[Toby451]

For starters, WoW's population was never even close to as bad as people on the forums/reddit/etc would lead you to believe. There are still many servers with heavy/full/mid pop despite the slowest content release cycle in the history of the game. Just a group of obnoxious people blowing their vuvuzelas and hopping on the "fuck blizzard" bandwagon fishing for easy karma.




Second, 9.1.5 fixed a majority of the problems with the game. Yes, we are still anxiously waiting for some actual new content but 9.1.5 has set the stage for 9.2 to be an excellent end to the expansion.



Third, its pretty normal for interest to pick back up for a major patch. Shadowlands hasnt been a particularly great expansion but its not been terrible either. There just isn't enough content being released to keep players interested between these long content droughts.

[Miriamel105]

I do wonder how FF14 is known to have beaten WoW in activity then? Like Blizzard hasn't said anything yet?

IMO it simply can't. FF14 and WoW servers are very alike when it comes to how many people they can support.

FF14 got 12 EU, 24 US and 32 Japanese servers. WoW classic alone got 40 US and 40 EU - and retail around 250 each.

90% of the WoW servers would have to be completely dead and in that case they would for sure reduce them by a lot.

As mainly FF14 player it was simply annoying to see, how much money Blizzard puts into servers - and seeing how little Square cares.

I play EU and it took them TWO years to even give us own servers. Two years in which we had to fight 1-2k ping.

One example from this time:



Normaly when you run out of that AoE marker before it vanishes, you are not getting hit. That's how the game is suppossed to work. Instead we had to live with this for two years. I could cast 1s castime spells, when it was worse even full 2,5s cast time spells WHILE constantly running, what of course shouldn't work at all. Normally I should almost instantly get the message that my running interrupts the cast.

Since FF14 also got housing, it was also always a prob to have 'too many' players on the server - which would be anything above low med.

Before Square made a big campaign to lure in WoW players and others, we had around 15k active players on EU and US server (Japan, because they got 32 server, but less people than US got around 10k). But there are (even now) only 5k housing plots. And those are shared between guilds and players. One reason why certain people can sell them for a few hundred dollars and more... (what is of course against ToS, but Square does not realy anything to enforce such things...).

Now with some WoW influencer having pushed players to FF14, the situation got even worse - though they gonna adde som servers. 4 more in around half a year and four more another year later. Then US and EU would be around on par with Japan. But overall that's still all together just 76 servers.

US would have needed at least 36 servers since several years (2015/2016), not 24 - and EU 18, not 12. BEFORE that increase in 2021. And to really fix the housing problem, you would have to double that of all three regions on top of that. That would be Around 150 servers. So still 100 less than WoW got in US or EU alone.

Overall I don't think many of the players will stay. Even for us FF fans it was harder and harder to accept how Square milked us. When I see how many of the new players are very angry ex WoW players I don't think they gonna take it better than us, as soon as they are out of the honeymoon phase and rushed through eight years of piled up content.

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Third, its pretty normal for interest to pick back up for a major patch. Shadowlands hasnt been a particularly great expansion but its not been terrible either. There just isn't enough content being released to keep players interested between these long content droughts.

It's indeed absolute normal, that a big part of a player base will not stay subbed the whole time, but just look into new content, unsub, (maybe) come back later and so on.

Taking FF14 as current example with a new expac, it was close to 100k peak on steam (that's not the only people who play it, though many of the new players will likely have gotten it over steam) the first day. A month later it's back to below 50k peak, but it would be dumb to call it a dead game because "omg, they have lost 50% of players after a single month!"

[Val the Moofia Boss]

You guys are quoting the wrong FFXIV pop numbers.

Here is an actual FFXIV census conducted two weeks ago that scanned the Lodestone (FFXIV's version of the armory). This scan includes the active (played within the last 60 days) characters of paying players (characters over level 60 or part of an FC, as free players are capped at 60 and can't join guilds) of NA, EU, and Japan. It does not include Korea or China, as those are seperate versions. The census took a sample of 1.34 million characters. In FFXIV, you can play every job on a single character, and there are no faction or race exclusive questlines, so almost everyone just has one character they actively play (whereas with WoW your average player has at the very least two characters. Belluar gave the average when he did his breakdown of the numbers a few months back). There has been consistent growth in the size of the active playerbase, though NA and EU have notably more upwards growth over the past two years than Japan.

[deenman]

Maybe if you're talking about transmogs, because for everything else, the existence of the token alone puts WoW leagues ahead in terms of whale potential, as you can buy just about anything that matters for real money that way - carries for all kinds of content, the most expensive mounts, black market AH, etc. It's gotten to the point where half of the groups in finder was advertising boosting. At least FFXIV doesn't have that(because it's forbidden to advertise boosting for in-game gold there, and they strictly enforce this). At worst there's a bot or two in the most crowded capitals offering RMT in very vague terms.

the wow shop is barebones,and its much harder and more expensive to buy tokens to use as gold to get ingame stuff than it is to use ingame gold to buy the shop stuff

in ff you dont have a choice and the prices are low enough where many people can afford stuff,and you have a lot of stuff

most people wont pay thausands of dolars to buy tokens to get some ingame mounts or ah gear

but plenty of people will spend a few bucks to get the legions of ff shop stuff

[Huntermyth]

well, i recently returned so you can tick another +1 on my behalf.

seriously tho, if you take retail as an example, wm on is full of horde and wm off is full of alliance. occasional alliance groups for hk farming or pvp zone quests etc. most korthia rares have 20+ people participating. i can find arena partners around my mmr (1.8 - 1.9 ) pretty easily.

what more to ask for ?

[Osperand]

For starters, WoW's population was never even close to as bad as people on the forums/reddit/etc would lead you to believe. There are still many servers with heavy/full/mid pop despite the slowest content release cycle in the history of the game. Just a group of obnoxious people blowing their vuvuzelas and hopping on the "fuck blizzard" bandwagon fishing for easy karma.




Second, 9.1.5 fixed a majority of the problems with the game. Yes, we are still anxiously waiting for some actual new content but 9.1.5 has set the stage for 9.2 to be an excellent end to the expansion.



Third, its pretty normal for interest to pick back up for a major patch. Shadowlands hasnt been a particularly great expansion but its not been terrible either. There just isn't enough content being released to keep players interested between these long content droughts.

You sound like a man who is beaten by his wife but thinks they deserve it. You have so much invested in the toxic relationship you cannot walk away.

How you can continue to support and promote a game that milks you for as much as it can while providing no extra content is beyond me. Maybe you need to take a look at your addiction (and it is that), you are missing something irl if you put up with it and also pay for the pain.

[Rucati]

I mean it probably does. 9.1.5 brought a lot of people back, myself included, plus classic has been dying off because of their refusal to fix the server population issues, and honestly WoW was never anywhere near as dead as people pretended it was.

I imagine that 9.2 will feel even more alive as more people will come back for the new content added. Depending on the quality of the raid 9.2 could actually turn out to be pretty good given all the other recent improvements to the game.

[Paulosio]

Logged in at about 6PM for the 1st time in a week on Thursday for my raid and only noticed about 2 or 3 people at the covenant in Ardenweald.

Not sure how relevant realm is with phasing and layering now though.

[Historical Tenacity]

well,i wouldnt put to much stock in that statement,as a good whale can bring in more money than thausands of sub onlys,and FF was made to be a whaling game,its far worse than wow in that regard,and more profitable

More subscribers does mean more people with the potential to use the mog shop and the square enix store (lore books, statues, stuffed animals, etc.), yes. It also means more returnees when new expansions come along. Though Yoshi-P also mentioned he has no control over the mog shop. It was a part of the deal whereby he has complete control of what happens with the actual game. I forget the nickname he has for the person in charge of it.

That said, he's the one who got invited into the Board of Directors and not those involved in the shop. It is the second game besides WoW to show continued growth as a P2P game year over year to the point where they have added multiple data centers and servers on separate ocassions. Also considering Square has the audacity to release FFVII:R on Epic for $70 with it being a bad port, and the president's message about NFTs, that company loves money. Probably not as much as Activision, but more than Sega as they have noted that they will avoid NFTs if their customers don't like them.

So it perplexed me when they gave FFXIV the spare no expense treatment. The sheer amount of money they must make on subscriptions, "box" sales and general sales must be astronomical. They did mention back in July that, by the end of June (even before Asmongold streamed it), they had almost 3x (about +200% more) the pre-orders for Endwalker than they did total for Shadowbringers. That was five months before Endwalker was set to be released. Who knows what the final pre-order sales were. Especially since that was before it became popular on the internet.

[trandwidther]

You sound like a man who is beaten by his wife but thinks they deserve it. You have so much invested in the toxic relationship you cannot walk away.

How you can continue to support and promote a game that milks you for as much as it can while providing no extra content is beyond me. Maybe you need to take a look at your addiction (and it is that), you are missing something irl if you put up with it and also pay for the pain.

Thanks for deciding what we enjoy for us, Mr Sanctimonious Authority. I actually enjoy the game and consider it a value proposition. I get hundreds of hours of entertainment for 10 bucks a month.

This is the really irritating thing about wow's current detractors. "We know what is best for you and you are addicted. " And/or "you should play this creepy anime game that you think you didn't enjoy because after 200 hours it gets good". Like I can't tell what I'm enjoying.

No,I like wow more than the alternatives right now. If I didn't I would quit as I have done several times before for long periods.

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You guys are quoting the wrong FFXIV pop numbers.

You want us to look at the participation numbers. No one cares. It doesn't matter that pre-existing players are playing longer that is what you would expect after a major expansion release. Those numbers would have been off the charts for Shadowlands at launch, it means nothing.

[Gimlix]

This is an example on my realm Argent Dawn: https://imgur.com/ZPz8kjv

It hasn't been this crowded for a while now. And it is becoming more and more common by the day.

[Deadite]

This is an example on my realm Argent Dawn: https://imgur.com/ZPz8kjv

It hasn't been this crowded for a while now. And it is becoming more and more common by the day.

umm you consider that crowded? I play on Kilrogg EU and it seems pretty dead to me. LFR/LFG have insane queues. My own sub runs out soonish and i won't be back till 9.2

To the folks linking FFXIV subs data. I would save your energy for something else. No proof will ever be accepted on this forum that any game in the world beats wow at anything on this forum. It is the biggest and bestest at everything!!!

[Gimlix]

umm you consider that crowded? I play on Kilrogg EU and it seems pretty dead to me. LFR/LFG have insane queues. My own sub runs out soonish and i won't be back till 9.2

To the folks linking FFXIV subs data. I would save your energy for something else. No proof will ever be accepted on this forum that any game in the world beats wow at anything on this forum. It is the biggest and bestest at everything!!!

Nah even for my standards that is still twice or three times as less people that i am used to. And it kills me from inside because i am the guy who likes as many people around me as people as possible. I do agree with you that i think WoW is in a worse state then people in here tend to believe. Also it is in a better state then some people tend to believe.

Also I have no clue what data used to say FF14 is on decline. I did only see a 10% decrease on steamusers last 30 days. But thats about it.

I do see a small increase in activity but as someone said before it can be anything. (people moving hub etc) in the end game ahs like 200 zones, 500 realms. Game is divided way too much.

[Deadite]

Nah even for my standards that is still twice or three times as less people that i am used to. And it kills me from inside because i am the guy who likes as many people around me as people as possible. I do agree with you that i think WoW is in a worse state then people in here tend to believe. Also it is in a better state then some people tend to believe.

It is safe to assume that the number of subs in somewhere between the white knights and the doom sayers numbers. Only Blizzard knows and they ain't talking. By all accounts it does look like FF is doing well. Can more than one mmo be doing well? *shock horror gasp!* They are video games. Play them when they are fun and piss off when they aren't. You don't have to have a lifetime commitment. I only play wow on expansion releases and major patches. I doubt i have more than 5 or 6 months in gamecards each expansion.

[trandwidther]

By all accounts it does look like FF is doing well.

From what I can make of the data Endwalker is doing only as well as Shadowbringers - which is fine, but after six months of streamer hype you'd really expect better. The engagement is higher but that is what you'd expect after an expansion release.

People forget wotlk had 14 million subs. FF14 isn't at a tenth of that. If that is the best they are capable then Blizzard need be no more worried about that than New World (which was also widely proclaimed to be wiping the floor with wow before it died horrible a few weeks after).

[glowpipe]

Wouldn't alts inflate WoW's numbers? People usually play 1 char with multiple jobs in FFXIV

How would alt's inflate the numbers tho? You can only ever play 1 character at a time. If you are on your alt and then swap to a new one every 10 min. you are still only 1 player

[ArkantosChampion]

i think people preparing their chars for a next season

[Aedruid]

How would alt's inflate the numbers tho? You can only ever play 1 character at a time. If you are on your alt and then swap to a new one every 10 min. you are still only 1 player

For example, if everyone logged into 2 characters the same day and there were let's say 100 people, the API would return 200 active characters for that day. Now for total current active users within a given moment, that would not be inflated. I guess it comes down to how many data points are collected / how they aggregate their data ... which I doubt they can delineate alts by a unique player account

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It skews the numbers, that's the point.

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Why should Blizzard care? The only thing that matters for how the business is run is the QR.

Good points as usual my friend.