Is the Game Population Dropping Fast?

The good news is that once they can’t get away with it WoW can be a great game again. Shadowlands truly is the greatest expansion in potential, it just has so many weird decisions holding players back from experiencing it for how it should be.

Feb 5th they are announcing either a major content patch or the next expansion for FFXIV too so I think that bodes well for the future of WoW. I hope more people try it out because even if it’s just a temporary swap over to take a break from WoW, it sends a message to blizzard and helps the industry move in a better direction as a whole. Lots of people won’t look back and find that they were simply prejudice toward FFXIV for superficial reasons.

@Hellasha You can skip the dialogue if you want, you can pay to skip through the story to latest expansion. I did that, but then found the gameplay so compelling that I made an alt and am now at the end of the second expansion. I have been reading 100% of the dialogue and closely paying attention to every cut scene. It’s not the reason I am playing the game at all, and I really want to get to the current end game, but I really feel like the game deserves the playthrough and I don’t mind it at all. Games are meant to be played through, not to be done with.

I agree that the dialogue is brutal and it’s more like a visual novel for the MSQ than an mmo, but if you’re not playing for that game then just skip through it all and get to the gameplay. The gameplay at end game is WAY more engaging than WoW.

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I buy games to play them, not buy them just to pay more money to skip to the end. That’s about as bad as paying one of those stupid scam level up sites to play the game for you. That’s a horrible concept that just shows how terrible FFXIV really is.

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I disagree. The gameplay loop at endgame is what you’d be paying for in that case, and the opportunity to be in the mmo world of FFXIV. It’s like 20 bucks lol, it’s not a big expense at all and if it weren’t there then everyone would just miss out on the great story.

You can still play FFXIV and skip without paying though is what I meant, just hit the cancel button every time the screen turns black “skip cutscene” and you’re back onto the next step. I am really tempted to play that way to be honest because it feels so good constantly getting xp for just skipping cutscenes, but I am enjoying the dialogue and character building too much to skip anything.

To each their own, but even if you only wanna play FFXIV for the mmo world + amazing end game rotations + amazing encounters that WoW can’t ever compare to unfortunately(3 RTS vs every final fantasy game, sorry the foundation just isn’t there in WoW yet). It’s a superior game lol. But it also happens to have a compelling story on top of having superior gameplay.

The other key factor is, FFXIV devs can not get away with preying on their playerbase. Blizzard is the only company that can get away with it because of how monolithic and longstanding WoW’s success is. It feels REALLY good to play a game that isn’t predatory by design.

edit: Quick question tho - do you read every WoW quest text start to finish? Or do you just accept, look at objective, and complete objective?

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Except they do get away with it. The existence of that token to skip the story is proof of that.

The final fantasy series is overrated with a very boring/bland story that can be found in just about any crappy anime.

Yes I read the quest text. I’m here to play the game, that includes the quests and story.

I don’t agree with that being proof, it’s just expensive enough to deter people from buying it. If it was optional, 99% of people would get impatient at some point and skip it. Most players do just skip the cut scenes as it’s not why they are playing the game. I am going out of my way to not avoid it even though I could just go to the part of the game I want to play. If that doesn’t say that the story is compelling then idunno what else to say.

I think you’re pretty unique as a WoW player who reads quest text, but it’s not very hard in shadowlands as nearly every quest only has one sentence of dialogue. I also read all the quest text but I didn’t find it particularly engaging, in fact I was extremely let down this expansion. Thinking way too many times that they were too lazy with the quest text.

The point I’m making though is, FFXIV doesn’t have quest text it just gives you dialogue scenes, very often fully voiced.

How far into FFXIV did you get? What does it mean to play the game to you?

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You’re wasting your time lol.

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lolol yeah but I need a break from FFXIV been grinding MSQ too hard.

It was BOTH… or rather, it’s like asking “which came first, the chicken or the egg”… yes, players do exclude non-BIS players from content, but it’s because Blizzard designs their system(s) to punish those players in some (or multiple) way(s) for NOT doing so…

I can’t – at the moment, due to being drunk, and autistic – think of a better example of this disparity (or however you want to describe it) than factoring in Kyrian vs. Venthyr for Demon Hunters…

You see, Elysian Decree is almost on-demand AoE, which is not shackled to ANY other defensive cooldowns… with a SOLID defensive component, for BOTH specs… that healing from those GUARANTEED SOUL FRAGMENTS for Havoc is something that benefits them in almost any situation, where as Sinful Brand in Mythic+ as a DPS will MAYBE get you a “thanks” from your tank…

On top of this, you can reduce the cooldown of Decree, MULTIPLE TIMES… with a Talent, a Legendary, AND a PvP Talent… TO 36 SECONDS IN PVP, DOWN FROM 1 MINUTE, ALMOST HALVED… and on top of this, you get a CONDUIT which echoes it…

Sinful Brand gets dispelled in PVP… with NO consequences for doing so, making it almost worthless… in an epic BG especially, you might as well be playing with no covenant abilities as Venthyr, because Door of Shadows gets interrupted too… there it is, YOU got your CORD RIPPED, and NOT the “ripcord”…

We’re also barely even considering the secondary or non-class abilities for covenants… I mentioned earlier Door of Shadows is interruptible, again with no consequences, that cannot be said enough… well Kyrian lets you to summon a CUUUUUUTE owl buddy which gives you POTIONS THAT DISPEL, WHICH ARE USABLE IN ARENA … you also get – at the same time – a vendor NPC that requires no rep grinding, no guild achievements, NOTHING OTHER THAN going Kyrian

I could go ON AND ON about how busted Kyrian for DH is compared to Venthyr, but I feel more bad for Necrolord DHs…

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem – BUT STILL A BIG PROBLEM – if we could switch covenants and keep our anima, souls, upgrades, et cetera for the covenant… BUT THIS IS NOT THE CASE…

There is NOTHING – I swear – that will send me faster, RUNNING AWAY SCREAMING, WITH MY HAAAAANDS IN THE AIR, OVER (BACK TO) STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC… than having to grind ALL THAT COVENANT ISH AGAIN after switching from Venthyr to Kyrian…

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9.1 will probably drop around may, but in may they would be talking about January to March, right? So 9.1 shouldn’t be helping anything in the first quarter.

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Did we play the same WoD? The threat of flying removal coupled with a horrendous launch certainly wasn’t popular.

Will be too little, too late… calling it now…

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Oh I completely agree. The person I responded to thought that maybe it would help a bit, but I was just saying that it wouldn’t be out in q1, so it wouldn’t help for that at all.

As far as it helping at all when it releases…they would have to reverse a lot of bad choices, and I don’t see that happening until at least 9.3.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic has better cutscenes IMO… your character isn’t mute either, and you get to romance NPCs…

Is SWTOR F2P? Yes… is it paywalled? Yes… like, practically all MMOs do that now, WoW is heading toward that and we know it… I consider factors like this to be irrelevant in deciding whether an MMO is “great” nowadays, but then again I am JADED AF

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While your character doesn’t speak in ffxiv, there are countless times you are given an RP dialogue decision that changes the response of the other characters and tone of the story for that moment. Key tone setting responses that really do carry over to the following events. I get to choose how I really feel about the situation the majority of the time too.

Aside from those moments yeah my character doesn’t say anything, but that’s how I feel it should be in an rpg. I would never want my character to say things on their own, let alone have a voice actor read out lines. Silent protagonist is the only way I can really get into the role. I don’t find writing to ever be relatable enough for my imagination or personality compared to filling in all the blanks myself. If someone else is doing voice acting lines for my character it doesn’t feel right for an rpg game. It’s more like an action game at that point to me.

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Towards the end of the patch where the only content is grinding and no quick fix . It will dip gradually

I loved Chrono Trigger, it was a great game, but Crono himself was my least favorite character in that game… it was always the others, who I felt were the TRUE protagonists of Chrono Trigger, just like in WoW how all the other lore figures are the TRUE protagonists… because WoW is not our WoW characters’ story by any measure, it is Jaina’s / Baine’s / Thrall’s / Anduin’s / Bolvar’s / et cetera’s, and our toons are (in some cases, almost literally) just vehicles… nothing more, nothing less…

Can a silent protagonist be done well? Sure, but a spoken protagonist takes more effort, and can be done MUCH better… WoW’s cutscenes and dialogue literally FEELS DEAD to me, I can’t really process it as well and have to actually read quest text like ALL the fooging time if I want to actually follow what’s going on, which most of the time I don’t because I’m just not that emotionally invested in it compared to games with VIVIDLY ALIVE story-telling like Star Wars: The Old Republic…

The funniest thing about WoW’s storytelling, or lack there-of, is that all they really need to do – in my view – to fix SOME of it at least, is just VOICE OUR CHARACTERS IN CUTSCENES… and add dialogue options IN THOSE CUTSCENES… the latter of which SW:TOR and FFXIV DO have in common, and obviously I don’t know why WoW hasn’t gotten with the times on that… I guess none of the former voice actors for our character emotes wanted to come back and do cutscenes with them huh, even though apparently VAs are struggling to find work in a pandemic… which I guess tells a lot about WoW and Blizzard and how seemingly difficult they are to work with now, compared to back when maybe almost everyone at the company felt like they had a future?

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Fromsoftware has made gold out of silent protagonists that are literally worthless in the grand scale of things.

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I could actually get behind a silent protagonist if – story-wise – they were ACTUALLY deaf / mute, and others reacted to them as if they were deaf / mute… like, if I make a dialogue choice, but all my character does is nod / shake their head / make other gestures… then the other characters should respond to them with SIGN LANGUAGE, and not spoken dialogue… we should have more representation in gaming for people with various disabilities, instead of these so-called “silent” protagonists who are offensive pretenders!

Without an actual Pathfinder To Do list, I’m not very motivated beyond keeping up on renown, and doing the daily Calling unless it’s The Maw and I’m really bored.

I’ve actually started to go back and try to collect as many Legion Artifact Bow skins now that we can use them in any spec.

So I’m still playing, just not in SL as much as older content.

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Everyone I know has quit.

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