Hmm. Well I do absolutely know what your talking about. I grew with and in games like that (ragnarok online).
I find WoW to be heavily social though… a little too much. But it could be because of what I’m into is completely different. If I want to actually push keys, I’ll have to find a community, discord, and mic up. Sometimes i just want to get lost and be alone and escape on my own…. And actually most of the time 
i think the “wow is dying/dead” meme went over your head.
when did you last level an alt?
the world has been buzzing everywhere since Chromie time was introduced
I don’t know about this Chromie time, but I’ll tell you Summting…
My girl likes to Chromie all the timeee!
I leveled in Azshara a week ago and saw a couple people. Wouldn’t say that’s buzzing.
sigh.
now Eddie Murphy will be invading my brain all night.
Because everyone is playing and enjoying the game… unlike WoW
WoW has pandarens, so it’ll be king forever.
FFXIV has lala’s
But it is hard to argue with your logic… ignore the fact I am HMP
In my experience its because of the lack of content meaning that people quit more easily and come back when there’s new story, FC’s (guilds) can be quite unstable because of this. Especially since there’s nothing like pvp to hold their attention, since the pvp in that game is quite bad. Roleplayers are better off, but the roleplaying community in that game is absolutely full of drama and like stepping around in a minefield.
imagine if square enix got its sht together and actually made it easy to make accounts/pay for their products.
I spent like 2 hrs making email accounts and trying to register an account to try their game before giving up lmao.
Atleast blizzard has a decent system to take our money.
That’s a product of japanese website design being very behind the times and all sorts of complicated mess, probably. It’s a thing over there, or so people that lived there have told me.
That really is the worst part of the game; buying it.
Because they didn’t.
All the news about the change in numbers comes from one website, mmo-population.com and to be fair, it’s not a bad website. It’s run by a few blokes as a hobby and they’re just doing something they enjoy, which is creating lists of MMOs and their populations to the best of their ability.
But not all MMOs release their subscriber numbers or active player counts. Blizzard used to with WoW, but stopped near the end of WoD. Square Enix has always kept that information confidential with FFXIV and has only ever talked about account creation numbers. Mmo-population.com compensates for this lack of information by using account creation numbers and ‘online sentiment’ to track whether or not an MMO has an active player count and how high that player count may be.
So basically, TL:DR is, they’re guessing based off of how much buzz there is about the game online.
It’s should surprise no one then when FFXIV ‘allegedly’ surpassed WoW using these guesstimates, because they just had a rather solid online show called the FF Fanfest where they announced the next expansion for FFXIV, so of course the online hype train started picking up speed and everyone and their mother started talking about it. That ‘online sentiment’ boosted the numbers mmo-population.com uses and pushed it above WoW, which hadn’t really talked about anything since Blizzcon in Februrary and was still dealing with delays when it came to testing and getting 9.1 ready to release.
So TL:DR they haven’t surpassed WoW, the numbers showing they did are flawed, but because everyone wants a stick to beat WoW with, they grabbed it the moment they had an opportunity and started whacking.
It technically didn’t even beat that number, I distinctly remember when actually reading it past the clickbaity articles that the numbers used were only better than WoW if they seperated WoW classic population and Retail WoW population and then only used one of them, but when added together the WoW total was still way above the FF14 one.
I do know that whenever I log in, almost all of us are sprouts. I think a lot of them are WoW players checking it out, but we are everywhere in there. Usually, when I log in during the day there is a queue of 20+ players ahead of me.
I don’t know how long it will remain popular though, it is probably a lot of tourists that have been reading it on these forums, as well as people who keep up with streamers. I think it makes doing dungeons a lot easier to get into, typical wait time for me for lower levels is about 15 minutes, unless I want to heal then it seems to be instant. I’m not sure how long it would have been before its uptick in popularity.
Going off of what I have experienced, there is a surge going on that is rather significant.
Yep, that as well, MMO-population separates Retail and Classic, which is flawed because there’s no way to tell how many retail/classic players are actually playing both.
Why do people think story based role-playing games are good streamer content?
It’s not.
This is technically true-ish but it wont hit until he reaches max level, and with he I mean asmongold since that’s the big one everyone keeps mentioning.
The guy does have a good eye for content mind you, for example he chose to do Garuda extreme at minimum item level sync. That’s not something people would normally do anymore but he did and it made for some good watchable content. Once he reaches the end of things though he will find it hard to continually produce content like he does for WoW, but then he has also stated he wants to keep playing both so whatever.
I mean FF has had higher viewers than WoW during 9.1 release many of the days so not sure what you mean. If WoW was #1 and there was any hype around it that wouldn’t happen during the launch of a new long awaited patch. People just don’t care anymore the hype for WoW is gone.
Also many streamers are continuing to just start streaming FF because of how popular it is and that is where all the hype is. They want to be a part of where the excitement is. Quinn just started yesterday. All the popular WoW streamers during a new patch launch are streaming FF on many days. I look at who I follow and it’s actually diverse games now instead of all WoW. There are other games out there and SL is a dumpsterfire that won’t be fixed.
It’s not fake metrics it’s pretty clear there is zero hype around WoW and the excitement is around other games. 9.1 is a flop and definitely didn’t bring back the massive amount of players that left. Just logically looking at what is obvious.
Side note can’t wait to play Ashes of creation, game looks great already and Steven Sharif is what a lead Dev should be like.
Why does everyone assume that streamer/viewership = popularity? If you look at the games with the highest viewers on Twitch, 8/10 of them in the top 10 will likely be competitive-based. The only exceptions would be either GTA V or Minecraft.
FFXIV is not competitive, therefore it doesn’t lend itself to being a streamer-centric game. That doesn’t mean it’s not popular.