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Anyone elses Free company become kinda dried up?
Dzone
Member UncommonPosts: 371
I feel like I'm experiencing the same thing with ffxiv that I did with GW 2. When I was playing GW 2 my once large guild literally died off after like 3/4 months.
Now with ffxiv arr I've been playing since launch. I remember back in the beginning we had usually around 40 people on. Today the guild roster has like around 160 people, but this past month or so, I usually only see around 10-20 people online in the afternoons during prime time. I've even counted 15 characters left the guild the past 7 days...
It's very rare to see anyone chat in our chat channel. Past month literally only like 2,3 times someones very briefly asked if anyone wanted to do some endgame content.
I've personally just been doing the exact same thing every day now. FFXIV just feels like a solo game now, more than it did in the past. Its become a lonely experience for me. Even in the game I see people all the time, but 90% of the time no one ever talks.
The thing is, when I played ffxi people in my linkshell were usually asking for help. We often talked to each other. We became really good friends over time, but it just hasn't been the same experience for me with ffxiv arr.
Has anyone elses free company dried up on um like mine has?
Comments
I see one of the problems being the funnelled progression route. Do boss - hard boss - even harder boss.
The fact that they made this as part of the story quest was a significant mistake in my opinion. Players are not all of the same mindset, yet they force routed them down this single story path that had to be completed.
It may suit a particular geographical regions style of play - keep hitting your head against the wall until you finally break through or die trying.
Seems a lot of players took the third option - play another game without this funnel progression.
And FFXIV is about to get hit with a "double-punch" as the ESO and Wildstar launches are looming ever closer. That doesn't mean a permanent loss of players, but a large amount of people will "try out" the new games, even if it's only for their first month.
Could even be a "triple-punch", seeing as EQN:Landmark is making ever louder noises about their imminent open beta...
Pretty much this. People don't stay in the game forever, if your guild leadership doesn't set a clear focus for it or doesn´t keep recruiting players, it will eventually become barren - consider switching FC
.
On a side note, i'm actually impressed by the amount of players still around (especially considering we're at the end of 2.1, and there's a big influx of players coming back in 2.2) either in Rev Toll, Wineport - even leveling!
We had one guy disappear from our Coil static to go play ESO and two others simply didn't show up the other night. Other factors like business trips and people getting jobs have affected my group as well. Mostly though, I think people are yearning for new content. We do the first 4 turns of Coil within an hour then slam our heads against T5 trying to conquer it. I think T5 has demotivated people to an extent. That and with the "Echo buff" making T1-5 easier in the next patch, I think people want to opt to wait to clear it until then, then move on to the new content.
I've found it hard to login myself past our raid night this week, but I think that mostly has to do with Diablo 3's new patch, and I've been really enjoying playing that with another friend. (it's still really boring solo because you're playing through the exact same stuff)
Two days ago I counted how many of our members had logged into the game the last 5 days.
It was 60%. Considering our company has 135 members, 60% retention rate is freaking amazing. If I had gone back 30 days, it would have been closer to 70%.
Honestly, I think FFXIV is one of the few subscription games that is thriving. Also, we're at the tail end of a content patch that came out in December. You're going to see the biggest dip in numbers exactly at this point.
Check back in the beginning of April and you're going to see a lot of people come back. That's the nature of the 3-4 month content cycle for a P2P game. It was the same for WoW.
Seemed like ffxi was different. Peaple stayed around for the long haul. They didn't play in short burst, only to return for new content. At least it wasn't like that for me.
I guss games have changed to where people are able to finish the content, take a break, only to return when new content arrives.
Wasn't always like this
Final fantasy xi had so many long term goals for people to go after. EX: fully upgraded relic weapons, NM hunting, Farming, to just leveling to begin with. FFXIV arr on the other hand, everything comes to us much smoother. Maybe after a few years it will have long term goals for people to go after, and not be able to complete everything in the new patch again...
Its funny, I've played for 7 months and have pretty much completed everything from level 1-49. Done all the hunting logs, leveled all classes to 50, completed all the class/job quest's, done all the quest's in game, but a few, like the barber one, the treasure hunting one, the crafting one, pretty much all the others. Max rank grand company, max company seals. Only need to unlock Summoner and do its job quest's.
Havn't really toached endgame yet though, but the game as far as 1-49 is pretty much done for me now. Now I'm forced to do endgame or level another character, which I don't see the point in, unless I wanna relive the quest-storyline again, which I don't wanna do.
My login time now is, doing the daily beast quest/ daily roulette, daily guildheast, and run a few more dungeons, and do battle leve's while waiting the the duty finder box to pop up. That's really all there is to do at endgame. I do those leve's so I don't end up just standing around revenants tole like everyone else seems to do. Standing around waiting for a duty finder box to pop up isn't what I consider fun. Even in ffxi while waiting for a pary I used to hunt nm's, while farming. Well at least I found 1 thing to do while waiting in ffxiv, well until I run oute leve's to do for the day... I'll prolly pick up fishing again and just fish while waiting for a dungeon, or primal.
The problem is that ffxi players came to this game thinking it would be ffxi but prettier. It turned out to be a totally different type of game made to the wow formula, unfortunately it does almost every aspect wrong imo and comes off as a far weaker and watered down version of wow. It loses the players that wanted ffxi and it loses the wow players that expect certain standards in their wow clones.
Many say give it time to add more content, the problem with that is these people have no experience with this kind of mmo design system. Come back in a year and it will have just as little content as it does now, just that it will be all different gear to chase and all different trio of dungeons to grind. FFXI built on the endgame content so that content added years ago was still relevent, FFXIV won't ever do that because each patch will replace and invalidate the last, it's an endless cycle of cheap assembly line update patch systems.
FFXI was a truely unique experience, sadly one that mmo creators don't want to make anymore. The reason ffxi had such great features was because it was so hard on the players, no mmo creators is going to make a game like that anymore.
Players join games. Players quit games. This is the natural order of things.
Players join guilds. Players leave guilds--both explicitly and implicitly by quitting the game. This, too, is the natural order of things.
You can argue that different qualities of a game will lead to higher or lower guild churn rates. But the churn will always be there. A guild that is not actively recruiting is a guild that is dying, as the players quitting or leaving aren't being replaced.
Honestly.....Yes.
I have 4 heavy play days and 3 mostly non-play days in my week. Today's a play day and for the first time I logged out early to do chores.
I could have ground for one of those last 2 CT raid drop armour pieces I still need on my Summoner. Or I could have done a few more myth time runs (one of my 2 characters isn't maxed out yet). But CT armour in a couple weeks will worthless for anything other than cosmetics. And tomorrow running the Coil raid with my Sunday static group should cap out that toon anyways.
I could have worked more on leveling my gathering and crafting classes, but they are kind of pointless. I could have worked on leveling more salt classes/jobs, but SE makes it impractical to gear out more than 2 or maybe 3 per character.
Come the new patch, there will again be lots to do, until hitting the new wall.