A recent measurement of active characters put FFXIV just a little over 1 million. FFXIV is a game that really doesn't require alts so it's likely that that is close to the actual player count. WoW has not reported sub numbers in years and is at the biggest lull in its history, so it wouldn't surprise me if FFXIV has finally surpassed it. But that's all speculation.
Yes.
XIVplayer here who's stagnating in Stormblood. Player number wankery's stupid.
AFAIK I'm still not counted as a player, been playng since January, played an average of 6 hours per day since the game went back on sale.
In 4 months time I'll be lucky if I'm even done with Shadowbringers. I'm havin' fun, been running dungeons, highly critical of dungeon design, level sync & job design from what I've played so far.
Yet I don't matter because I haven't met an arbitrary performance metric to be included in some automated bot survey. Meanwhile WoW/Activision don't report player numbers, they share their metrics with other dead games like OW (which I came from) and their metric they report is "MAU's" Monthly active users and even that's not an accurate metric since it's players who have "accessed" a game in a given month. They reach this figure by adding the users in a year then dividing the figure by 12 (for months) so it's a spread year on year and mostly useless since you can't tell exactly when and where players are or are not playing. Also the MAU metric if even more flawed in that if you were to "access" WoW in a month then you would be counted as 1 MAU per month but if you were to access Overwatch on your account too then you would be counted as 2 users, when you have games like OW where players may have as many as 10 smurf accounts and you've got blizzdrones who play many titles it just doesn't really work out as a great unit.
MAU's are there to sell shares and interest advertisers/sponsors.
Game number wankery's not worth it. I could login to OW right now load up a popular mode, play a role that's not in demand and be matched with players within about a minute or I could queue for competitive and wait 20-40 minutes for a game regardless of which role I pick.
If the content you want to play is populated and you're having fun: go for it. If it's a rotten barren husk then idk look for something else.
A recent measurement of active characters put FFXIV just a little over 1 million. FFXIV is a game that really doesn't require alts so it's likely that that is close to the actual player count. WoW has not reported sub numbers in years and is at the biggest lull in its history, so it wouldn't surprise me if FFXIV has finally surpassed it. But that's all speculation.
XIVplayer here who's stagnating in Stormblood. Player number wankery's stupid.
AFAIK I'm still not counted as a player, been playng since January, played an average of 6 hours per day since the game went back on sale.
In 4 months time I'll be lucky if I'm even done with Shadowbringers. I'm havin' fun, been running dungeons, highly critical of dungeon design, level sync & job design from what I've played so far.
Yet I don't matter because I haven't met an arbitrary performance metric to be included in some automated bot survey. Meanwhile WoW/Activision don't report player numbers, they share their metrics with other dead games like OW (which I came from) and their metric they report is "MAU's" Monthly active users and even that's not an accurate metric since it's players who have "accessed" a game in a given month. They reach this figure by adding the users in a year then dividing the figure by 12 (for months) so it's a spread year on year and mostly useless since you can't tell exactly when and where players are or are not playing. Also the MAU metric if even more flawed in that if you were to "access" WoW in a month then you would be counted as 1 MAU per month but if you were to access Overwatch on your account too then you would be counted as 2 users, when you have games like OW where players may have as many as 10 smurf accounts and you've got blizzdrones who play many titles it just doesn't really work out as a great unit.
MAU's are there to sell shares and interest advertisers/sponsors.
Game number wankery's not worth it. I could login to OW right now load up a popular mode, play a role that's not in demand and be matched with players within about a minute or I could queue for competitive and wait 20-40 minutes for a game regardless of which role I pick.
If the content you want to play is populated and you're having fun: go for it. If it's a rotten barren husk then idk look for something else.
The playerbase doesn't matter. You will never interact or see 99.999999% of them regardless how many players are online. This is especially true for FF14. They would just add/merge servers if player numbers change.
This is most MMORPGs now a days. They're "MMOs" but you rarely interact with them that much. Usually whatever game's raid group size is the highest you'll interact with at a given point. Even if you're in a guild of 500, most of them will never see each other. And along with that, most are only talking in discord. Since discord has become the new facebook.
I was thinking about that the other day. I probably change what MMO I'm playing every month. And every single one, people hardly interact with one another. They spend most of the day playing by themselves/hardly talking. It's so weird. If people expressed a desire to be more social, maybe we'd get more MMO-isc content. Right now it seems like Gw2 is probably the only true themepark MMORPG since you can interact with an entire map shard via world bosses or 50 other players on your team in WvW. Which is a shame cause I think Gw2's combat is pretty god damn bad.
>Even if you're in a guild of 500, most of them will never see each other. And along with that, most are only talking in discord. Since discord has become the new facebook.
This is my XIV experience.
403 active members, I play an average of 6h a day and I barely see anyone talk and if I do it's the same 4-8 people.
I made an effort to interact a little here and there but kept to my shit since they offer shit buffs but unless there's an event organised on discord you won't see them anywhere and I refuse to use discord because it's a game & community killer. I'll use it if I want to with some old friends but that's it.
Their discord channel? Pretty dead all around too but the small circle who chat also do in there. Maybe I have a bad FC (most offer the teleportation rate buff) but this is the third server I've been on so far and it's been the same for every FC.
The thing that really matters for what I'm doing? Duty finder & Party finder. Duty finder gives me that ez group to do dungeons/duties with and PF lets me join dead content with others, do farm stuff etc and it's basically necessary for end game I've heard.
It doesn't matter how many people are afk in my home town or any of that shit, which streamer is saying they'll play on the server that week or whatever. It barely effects me. I login, do duties, do some side content and I'm not an RPer and not on an RP server. Player count only matters in the sense that it keeps queue times slightly lower.
>Your entire experience could be replaced by NPCs
Ye pretty much, they add a little more chaos to it, players can be better or worse than bots but generally ye I'd lose out on little interactions here or there but nothing else.
I know I'm not at endgame or anything but it's not like I seethe over XIV not being a pure MMO or anything either: I've enjoyed most of the content I've done first time and I know there's things that could be improved.
My biggest problems with the game aren't even seething over it's "MMO" status like some haters/shitposters do.
It's seething over it's dungeon & job design which promotes spamming AOE endlessly down a hallway onto 13 monsters because MMO players can only ever do anything efficiently otherwise they'll make a seethepost on a subreddit about something taking 3 minutes longer or some player didn't cater to their whims. It makes dungeons an experience where you run it down, spam your E key (my AOE) and it's follow up until shit dies, move on and do a single target rotation. Not much changes at all, most duties mirror this.
Being completely honest. I think I'd prefer XIV as a more MH style of game you can play either online or offline, get the fun interactions if you want, party up and that's good. As an MMO and a sub based MMO? Ugh....at times I really don't feel that.
XIV feels like it shoulda been that type of game instead but it's born from a failed MMO so it also has to be an MMO. It's a trap. Maybe it helps it to not die off as fast, idk I'm not some vidya psychologist out to rape player's minds by feeding them good feel hormones.
Well yeah, the downside of streamlining the MMO and ripping out all the socialization is you have to streamline its gameplay to be as braindead bottom line as possible.
Early days of MMOs you needed other players, because each player brought a resource along, either an extra puller to make things faster, an extra tank so you can rotate out between pulls, an extra healer so you can regenerate mana, and trivialize some content with CC, such as using a root and a fear on a mob and bashing meleeing it to death to save on resources. And zerging was naturally punished by only offering small amounts of loot per kill, so you wanted to minimize as many people as possible per kill so that everyone has a better chance at the items that drop, hence why some guilds got competitive for camping bosses.
I too absolutely fricking hate the boss rush hallways we have now, AOE infinite threat tanking while 2-3 glass cannons spam AOEs and one person spams heals is boring AF because you're no longer engaging with the game directly, but in a more passive, going through the motions way. Its why I stopped playing fantasy MMOs and moved to EVE, where its PVP driven and you're constantly engaging with other players passively (d-scan, watching local, ect to avoid ganks) or actively (fighting players), or moved onto playing monster hunter, where the monsters are actually interactive and you can play with 3 other players if you wanted.
Investors, telling your investors you're losing them billions of dollars a year because you put an intern in charge of your flagship game who streamlined the game around a very small % of PVE speedrunners is a bad idea.
Its why they now have "Better metrics" like store item sales, remember every single store item sold is worth 1-3 subs, and the esports scene will spend thousands of dollars per character doing transfers just to get ilvl boosted so they can still split farm.
Yep, its why WOW went down the korean trash path, and spend more time developing store shit then actual in game content now, the new tier sets were dogshit compared to the special set they added into the store, raid rewards are just recolors and reskins of the same mount from previous patches, while store mounts get entire special mount animations and unique skeletons.
Blizzard also refuses to consolidate all their dead servers and still funnel new players into 'new player' servers (aka dead servers) in order to israelite more transfers out of people.
Fricking Hozzikotas will do anything to sell his absolute mental gymnastics that alienating and destroying the game for most of the playerbase to streamline it for world first raiders, while also israeliteing the frick out of them isn't bad for the game.
People were fricking hyped for Warlords of Draenor, an entire expansion marketed as a return to form, with a focus on building your own garrisons and raising an army, instead garrisons were half finished garbage and the open world was abandoned in favor of raiding (again) and guess what, people got fricking bored of raidlogging again and quit by the millions.
No one likes raidlogging except sweaty poopsocking nerds, no one likes all their progression hard reset each patch with 'catch up' gear better than anything that isn't mythic raiding. And don't get me started on M+, challenge modes were bad enough, MOP/WOD dungeons were garbage, but cementing the 15 minute long speedrun trash as the standard for dungeon design moving forward is why no one gives a frick. People want to play with their friends and have a solid reason to do so, but the entire M+ structure is designed to make you hate the people you're grouping with.
FFXIV has never had more active players or players in general than World of Warcraft
And I honestly don't think it ever will just purely out of game design. There's just no reason to stay subbed to FFXIV while WoW offers, even in it's worst version if you want to call it that, premium end-game.
There are at least 700k people parsing as destro warlocks alone in sunwell, retail barely hits 200k parses across all specs
FFXIV probably has about a million active players, maybe, but now that the WOW refugee hype has died down and endwalker happened, they're probably bleeding away that wave, especially when those f2p gays hit the paywall and realize that FFXIV is not a subscription worthy game.
It never did?
Neither company reports sub numbers, FFXIV only reported total accounts made once, which was less then WOW's active subs in its prime.
ff14 is mostly bullshit numbers, wow is still 3-4 times its size.
yes yes, of course wow sister
Classic maybe, retail is fricking dead.
A recent measurement of active characters put FFXIV just a little over 1 million. FFXIV is a game that really doesn't require alts so it's likely that that is close to the actual player count. WoW has not reported sub numbers in years and is at the biggest lull in its history, so it wouldn't surprise me if FFXIV has finally surpassed it. But that's all speculation.
XIVplayer here who's stagnating in Stormblood. Player number wankery's stupid.
AFAIK I'm still not counted as a player, been playng since January, played an average of 6 hours per day since the game went back on sale.
In 4 months time I'll be lucky if I'm even done with Shadowbringers. I'm havin' fun, been running dungeons, highly critical of dungeon design, level sync & job design from what I've played so far.
Yet I don't matter because I haven't met an arbitrary performance metric to be included in some automated bot survey. Meanwhile WoW/Activision don't report player numbers, they share their metrics with other dead games like OW (which I came from) and their metric they report is "MAU's" Monthly active users and even that's not an accurate metric since it's players who have "accessed" a game in a given month. They reach this figure by adding the users in a year then dividing the figure by 12 (for months) so it's a spread year on year and mostly useless since you can't tell exactly when and where players are or are not playing. Also the MAU metric if even more flawed in that if you were to "access" WoW in a month then you would be counted as 1 MAU per month but if you were to access Overwatch on your account too then you would be counted as 2 users, when you have games like OW where players may have as many as 10 smurf accounts and you've got blizzdrones who play many titles it just doesn't really work out as a great unit.
MAU's are there to sell shares and interest advertisers/sponsors.
Game number wankery's not worth it. I could login to OW right now load up a popular mode, play a role that's not in demand and be matched with players within about a minute or I could queue for competitive and wait 20-40 minutes for a game regardless of which role I pick.
If the content you want to play is populated and you're having fun: go for it. If it's a rotten barren husk then idk look for something else.
> it wouldn't surprise me if FFXIV has finally surpassed it
For active concurrent I wouldn't be surprised if Lost Ark is also above WoW.
Lost Ark is also 95% bots
Yes.
The playerbase doesn't matter. You will never interact or see 99.999999% of them regardless how many players are online. This is especially true for FF14. They would just add/merge servers if player numbers change.
This is most MMORPGs now a days. They're "MMOs" but you rarely interact with them that much. Usually whatever game's raid group size is the highest you'll interact with at a given point. Even if you're in a guild of 500, most of them will never see each other. And along with that, most are only talking in discord. Since discord has become the new facebook.
I was thinking about that the other day. I probably change what MMO I'm playing every month. And every single one, people hardly interact with one another. They spend most of the day playing by themselves/hardly talking. It's so weird. If people expressed a desire to be more social, maybe we'd get more MMO-isc content. Right now it seems like Gw2 is probably the only true themepark MMORPG since you can interact with an entire map shard via world bosses or 50 other players on your team in WvW. Which is a shame cause I think Gw2's combat is pretty god damn bad.
>Even if you're in a guild of 500, most of them will never see each other. And along with that, most are only talking in discord. Since discord has become the new facebook.
This is my XIV experience.
403 active members, I play an average of 6h a day and I barely see anyone talk and if I do it's the same 4-8 people.
I made an effort to interact a little here and there but kept to my shit since they offer shit buffs but unless there's an event organised on discord you won't see them anywhere and I refuse to use discord because it's a game & community killer. I'll use it if I want to with some old friends but that's it.
Their discord channel? Pretty dead all around too but the small circle who chat also do in there. Maybe I have a bad FC (most offer the teleportation rate buff) but this is the third server I've been on so far and it's been the same for every FC.
The thing that really matters for what I'm doing? Duty finder & Party finder. Duty finder gives me that ez group to do dungeons/duties with and PF lets me join dead content with others, do farm stuff etc and it's basically necessary for end game I've heard.
It doesn't matter how many people are afk in my home town or any of that shit, which streamer is saying they'll play on the server that week or whatever. It barely effects me. I login, do duties, do some side content and I'm not an RPer and not on an RP server. Player count only matters in the sense that it keeps queue times slightly lower.
Your entire experience could be replaced by NPCs and it wouldn't be different.
This is why FFXIV is a dogshit MMO.
>Your entire experience could be replaced by NPCs
Ye pretty much, they add a little more chaos to it, players can be better or worse than bots but generally ye I'd lose out on little interactions here or there but nothing else.
I know I'm not at endgame or anything but it's not like I seethe over XIV not being a pure MMO or anything either: I've enjoyed most of the content I've done first time and I know there's things that could be improved.
My biggest problems with the game aren't even seething over it's "MMO" status like some haters/shitposters do.
It's seething over it's dungeon & job design which promotes spamming AOE endlessly down a hallway onto 13 monsters because MMO players can only ever do anything efficiently otherwise they'll make a seethepost on a subreddit about something taking 3 minutes longer or some player didn't cater to their whims. It makes dungeons an experience where you run it down, spam your E key (my AOE) and it's follow up until shit dies, move on and do a single target rotation. Not much changes at all, most duties mirror this.
Being completely honest. I think I'd prefer XIV as a more MH style of game you can play either online or offline, get the fun interactions if you want, party up and that's good. As an MMO and a sub based MMO? Ugh....at times I really don't feel that.
XIV feels like it shoulda been that type of game instead but it's born from a failed MMO so it also has to be an MMO. It's a trap. Maybe it helps it to not die off as fast, idk I'm not some vidya psychologist out to rape player's minds by feeding them good feel hormones.
Well yeah, the downside of streamlining the MMO and ripping out all the socialization is you have to streamline its gameplay to be as braindead bottom line as possible.
Early days of MMOs you needed other players, because each player brought a resource along, either an extra puller to make things faster, an extra tank so you can rotate out between pulls, an extra healer so you can regenerate mana, and trivialize some content with CC, such as using a root and a fear on a mob and bashing meleeing it to death to save on resources. And zerging was naturally punished by only offering small amounts of loot per kill, so you wanted to minimize as many people as possible per kill so that everyone has a better chance at the items that drop, hence why some guilds got competitive for camping bosses.
I too absolutely fricking hate the boss rush hallways we have now, AOE infinite threat tanking while 2-3 glass cannons spam AOEs and one person spams heals is boring AF because you're no longer engaging with the game directly, but in a more passive, going through the motions way. Its why I stopped playing fantasy MMOs and moved to EVE, where its PVP driven and you're constantly engaging with other players passively (d-scan, watching local, ect to avoid ganks) or actively (fighting players), or moved onto playing monster hunter, where the monsters are actually interactive and you can play with 3 other players if you wanted.
Impossible to know because Wows subscriber count is classified
funny, I wonder why did they classify it
Investors, telling your investors you're losing them billions of dollars a year because you put an intern in charge of your flagship game who streamlined the game around a very small % of PVE speedrunners is a bad idea.
Its why they now have "Better metrics" like store item sales, remember every single store item sold is worth 1-3 subs, and the esports scene will spend thousands of dollars per character doing transfers just to get ilvl boosted so they can still split farm.
Yep, its why WOW went down the korean trash path, and spend more time developing store shit then actual in game content now, the new tier sets were dogshit compared to the special set they added into the store, raid rewards are just recolors and reskins of the same mount from previous patches, while store mounts get entire special mount animations and unique skeletons.
Blizzard also refuses to consolidate all their dead servers and still funnel new players into 'new player' servers (aka dead servers) in order to israelite more transfers out of people.
Fricking Hozzikotas will do anything to sell his absolute mental gymnastics that alienating and destroying the game for most of the playerbase to streamline it for world first raiders, while also israeliteing the frick out of them isn't bad for the game.
People were fricking hyped for Warlords of Draenor, an entire expansion marketed as a return to form, with a focus on building your own garrisons and raising an army, instead garrisons were half finished garbage and the open world was abandoned in favor of raiding (again) and guess what, people got fricking bored of raidlogging again and quit by the millions.
No one likes raidlogging except sweaty poopsocking nerds, no one likes all their progression hard reset each patch with 'catch up' gear better than anything that isn't mythic raiding. And don't get me started on M+, challenge modes were bad enough, MOP/WOD dungeons were garbage, but cementing the 15 minute long speedrun trash as the standard for dungeon design moving forward is why no one gives a frick. People want to play with their friends and have a solid reason to do so, but the entire M+ structure is designed to make you hate the people you're grouping with.
FFXIV has never had more active players or players in general than World of Warcraft
And I honestly don't think it ever will just purely out of game design. There's just no reason to stay subbed to FFXIV while WoW offers, even in it's worst version if you want to call it that, premium end-game.
Classic > FFXIV > Retail
There are at least 700k people parsing as destro warlocks alone in sunwell, retail barely hits 200k parses across all specs
FFXIV probably has about a million active players, maybe, but now that the WOW refugee hype has died down and endwalker happened, they're probably bleeding away that wave, especially when those f2p gays hit the paywall and realize that FFXIV is not a subscription worthy game.