What Do You Want To See In FFXI?

nowhere in my post was i implying this cultist rambling nor was i advising anyone to go play a new game. if you really need to condense a two line, single sentence into a tl.dr. then it'd read "go home and be a family man".

This is very true. Take Fortnite... I know several who played it and admitted it was not fun. They only played it because that was the popular game that streamers said you should play. Random guy on the internet says "This is what you must play" and sheeple will do it.

That's also how they were making so much money when they first came out. Got teens to believe they were "complete noobs" if they didn't buy this $20 skin that came out this week... only to repeat the following week.

I miss the days of independent thought.

isn't it more of a paranting problem tho? if parants wouldn't just hand out their credit card details so the kid shuts up, maybe gaming wouldn't be where it's now.

It depends on the parent type.

Someone posted on Facebook once something like "V-bucks have gotten more chores done in my house. Want more bucks? Fold the laundry!" That got a ton of positive feedback but I disagree. That teaches kids to take bribes to do things they should be doing. I'm fine with giving kids an allowance if they keep up with their chores but that doesn't stop the root issues. That and yes, being a good parent. I had to explain to my "at the time" 13 year old that caring what random people in a video game think of you is pointless. Ever seen that Triumph video of Star Wars? Imagine being surrounded by that crew and caring what they thought about you.

Isn't this how word of mouth marketing works regardless of industry and technology? For example if many people said X restaurant is good then I'd at least want to give it a try. Because even if I ended up disliking their service at least I have something to talk about with friends.

And influencer's opinion just gains more exposure than most other people because of large amount followers. But followers listening to influencer's opinion isn't too different from my friends trying out a new restaurant that I personally recommended tbh.

Btw influencer's influence isn't limitless...it only affects followers who like that influencer to begin with. Like how you would listen to friend's recommendations.

Kind of but I was referring specifically to streamers. People will not try but like things just because a streamer likes them. I've talked to enough streamer fans to know how oblivious they are. "What do you think of..." "Well X streamer thinks..!" The question was "What do YOU think"

It's one thing for somebody to recommend something and you try it. It's another when you blindly follow just to follow. Note how I mentioned people will continue playing and openly admit "I'm not having any fun but X streamer is playing, so I must too"

my mind first jumped to word of mouth, too. however that completely ignores the fact that influencers get paid to promote a product or service. good example how much more subtle yet intrusive advertisements became over the years.

I'm not trying to argue that old games are "the best" or that we need to stop making new games because we've already hit some sort of pinnacle. I'm trying to get across that some of us didn't really like the Call of Dutys and WoWs and FIFAs that sold really well and became the poster children for subsequent generations.

We didn't like WoW, we liked FFXI. So when WoW got popular and every MMORPG that came out after it copied that formula, it didn't appeal to us. The reason we aren't playing new MMOs isn't because we resent them, it's because they're following the formula we have never been interested in. I'm sure if FFXI took off in popularity instead and everyone followed that formula, we'd be the ones trying out each new MMO release, while the WoW population barely hovered in the thousands.

Many fans of those MMOs like to deny that this is true.

It's one thing to be in the same genre "Side-scrolling platformer" but when the entire design is almost simply overlaid with aesthetics from another game, it's not exciting.

I tried the others and I did have fun with them but it never felt "new and fresh". But I guess that's not a deciding factor for some.

An MMO is not designed to be fun and interesting, it's sole purpose is addiction. Being pretty and keeping your attention comes a distant second.

It should be fun if they want you to get addicted, right? I've played many MMOs and I don't care what rewards are there, if it's not fun, I don't play.

Do you play many games that are not fun?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types

There are other motivators, than "fun"

(also, mmo specifically, I have never, nor will ever play another mmo (*)unless making money from it is even less stressful and at least as lucrative)

There are 2 reasons for that though.

1) Generally, people follow streamers with a similar taste. So if that streamer like something then their followers probably have a similar preference.

For example, I don't play sports game, so I don't follow sports game streamer ever. But if I like survival horror game then I may follow a streamer that streams survival horror game.

Then if that streamer recommended a survival horror game I may give it a try. Because I know that person has similar preference as me.

2) Playing the same game as your streamer also means it's easier to engage in conversations when I watch they stream. And since "social" is one very big reason why gamers play video games, it's not surprising that people play certain game because of the community that they are in.

That being said, influencer's opinion isn't magic. It doesn't work on anyone on anything. It mostly work on their followers and within the community that they built. So I don't think it's fair to say that streamers single handedly turn people into sheeps. It's more like people play these games because they already have the same preference and already within the same community.

For what it's worth, they're not technically wrong. They all follow the blueprints of that formula, but they'll each try something new. Whatever game finds success will be the new base for subsequent attempts.

To someone like myself who doesn't enjoy first-person shooters, I couldn't even tell you if I was looking at a Call of Duty game or a Battlefield game. It's like an alien looking at a pair of humans; they don't yet recognize all of the facial features or other intricate details that make them unique. If the features they recognize as unique are things such as hair, they might not even be able to tell the difference between a human and an ape. Maybe not even a human and a dog. "Well, they both have two ears, a nose, and hair, don't they??"

Same thing looking in from the perspective of FFXI, where things are so drastically different from the WoW formula. To me, FFXIV and WoW might as well be the same game because neither of them have the features I like from FFXI. But to someone who's played both, they'd tell me I'm insane and could tell me hundreds of differences.

I'm an explorer! FFXI is super loose with rules and its mechanics are rife with opportunity to try different things. Especially when the game was new, I could spend hours just plugging different job/subjobs together and imagining how they'd work. But as long as they keep doing stuff like Master Levels, the game will never be totally "solved", and I find that super exciting.

Fun can be looked at from other angles. It sounds like all those types are having fun in one way or another. You have fun gaining all those achievements. You have fun socializing with others.

MMOs are meant to be fun as well as "addicting". You keep the hamster wheel going or else the content dries up and people leave. WoW was an addicting game but a lot of people who loved it quit completely because the new content was not fun.


There is a big difference between enjoying something as someone with similar tastes and openly admitting you're not enjoying something but only doing it because some random person on the internet says you should.


I don't understand the appeal to this. It's like watching someone else sit there and play a game when you could be playing it yourself.

I also wonder how many play games because of the social aspect. You have plenty who want to play MMOs solo. I think the best response I ever saw was when someone asked on the WoW forums "Why play WoW if you want to play solo?" and someone said "Because there aren't any more Warcraft single player games.


Of course it isn't. It just proves how many naive people we have out in the world.


FPS is a genre, same as MMO. You can be in the same genre without being a completely obvious copy of something else. Taking a page from a book is one thing. Taking a whole series of chapters is another.

Agreed.

Though I've been questioning more and more how viable the categorization of genres even works. So many games pull in concepts from so many sources, and yet they all kind of evolve their own way. Like, MMORPG is a pretty good start, but we could probably divide that into "EverQuestlike" and "WoWlike", and then each of those could probably be further subdivided.

Dark Souls became popular so a lot of games tried copying that formula. What started out as people saying "rip-off of Dark Souls" is now given its own subgenre of "Soulslike".

Whatever FFXIV did to make it stand out among the WoWlike crowd is going to be studied until someone makes the next leap forward. WoW is no longer the poster child of that market. Trying to capitalize on its formula instead of the XIV formula is going to be futile, because XIV is already the next step in that popularity contest.

Short answer: a lot.

Long answer:

Quantic Foundry break down gamer's motivation into 6 categories:
https://quanticfoundry.com/insight-report/#

Action, social, mastery, achievement, immersion, creativity. Social being one of them on the list.

It's the main reason why games like Human: Fall Flat and Valheim sold extremely well even though those games aren't all that fun playing solo.

As far as "watching someone else sit there and play a game" goes. I do that occasionally, because 1)I don't want to spend money to buy a game that I may not finish. 2) I am too lazy to play. 3) I can see the real time reaction of the streamer which is often entertaining if I like them. 4) I can talk to people about the game in the chat room.

I would say watching a stream is different kind of entertainment from actually playing them. They are fun for very different reasons.

Playing MMO solo is not the same as playing a single player game btw. Even if you never join any PUG on Asura you can still buy and sell stuff from other players. Participate in chat or LS, and such.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for originality.

But it doesn't mean I do not have fun with games like that. The subgenre, as you mentioned in games called "Metroidvania" are fun to me. Take Hollow Knight for example. It took that subgenre and made something original. But I've seen some of these others that come out which take every chapter from the source. The position of the health bar, the exact same systems, etc.

Even one of my favorite old MMOs, Ragnarok online decided to clone WoW when the sequel came out. It was so bad, it became a meme in the community.

This is something else nobody I know understands. Streamers make reaction videos. Why is this interesting? Why is someone else going " :O!!! OMG! " view-worthy or by any means important? Why don't you see what YOUR reaction to it is?.. I had to do a lot of clicking to get those stupid *** Amsoglod reaction videos to stop appearing in my search query for things that had nothing to do with them when I played WoW.


"One of us..." I can't see that being a very healthy or productive discussion but different strokes, I guess.


Buying something from the AH is in a sense "interacting" with others but not directly. Some people just don't want to. Some MMOs really shoehorn you into interactions no matter how hard you try to avoid.

Definitely. That's just part of the evolutionary process. A lot of companies don't know what made a game successful in the first place. Research, care, and attention need to go into those kinds of things. But when a company is trying to rip off another game, it's to make a quick buck anyway. Sometimes it's just a fluke, too.

I think this is because human emotions resonates by nature. Like if you are in a room that every is laughing, it's tough not to smile at least a little. It's also the same reason why comedy shows often play laughing sound effects during funny moments. To enhance the emotions.

That being said, not everyone gets affected by human emotions equally. That may explain why for some people watching streamer's reaction isn't as interesting and vice versa.

Personally, I do watch "reaction video" when I want to re-experience certain part of story and emotions from a film or game. I find watching others reaction makes this experience more... enhanced(?). Like for example, if I see a dramatic moment in a film or game that made me emotional, if I wanted to re-experience this dramatic moment again, watching somebody else actually crying on the same moment makes this experience stronger.

I agree with how emotions resonate but I'm still not seeing the appeal for reaction videos. I guess if you find enjoyment out of them, who am I to say anything? Goes both ways as far as things I'm interested in. I love retro games. Many people don't nor grasp why anyone would enjoy.

I guess it all circles back to my own personal feelings about streamers. It's a cool idea but has made so many dumb people famous.

We like to think we aren't evolved animals, and everything we do is a concious decision. However we are still influenced by our lizard brain, we are still attracted to tribe/pack mentality and people treat streamers as pack leaders. This is what popularity is all about, wanting to join some big pack of people all playing something "popular" so they can belong and fit in.

If this stuff didn't work, companies wouldn't pay streamers tens of thousands of dollars a day to stream their games.

This is also what pre-ordering and wanting to play on day 1 is about I think, it's getting into this big hype machine where lots of people are all talking about and playing the game and wanting to fit in and be a part of it.

To me, it's sad, pathetic yet there are so many sheeple out there that companies can make big profit from due to this. I always tell streamer fans, if you're that eager to toss away money for no good reason, I'll gladly share my paypal address with you. I'll even go on webcam and hop around like a monkey if you want the experience to feel authentic.

And I quit preordering games when rushing them incomplete from a technical standpoint has become more prevalent.

What is so sad about this? :p. We live in a capitalism society, and "profit" put food on our table.

Honestly I quite like how consumers are emotional driven. Without influencers(streamers), it will be much, much harder for smaller studios to market their games. Since every other marketing strategy like TV ad, Facebook ad or press coverage are less efficient than influencer's recommendations.

It also makes our world more interesting with emotions as a driving force behind business.

Because of this, we live in a world of less free thinkers and more sheeple. Are people that skittish that they rely on some random guy on the internet to teeter their feelings/emotions? Call me old but in my day, when I was upset about something, it was because I was personally upset about it. I wasn't upset because some guy from across the globe who I've never met nor ever will told me I should be. That immediately makes me think, in FFXI terms, automaton.


There are plenty of forms of marketing that existed for decades before streamers. Several kickstarter projects have flourished with 1-3 people and had 0 need for or had 0 influence from these people.


I highly question the accuracy of this statement. I think this is giving someone/something a significant amount more credit than due.

But you are clearly a streamer fan, so doing just that is not uncommon. I've seen streamer fans give streamers credit for all sorts of things they didn't even remotely do.

Interesting is a subjective word.

You value "free thinking" highly, and yet when someone made a statement, instead of actually doing research and come up with a data driven conclusion, you jump into a conclusion on your own only because you assumed that I'm a fan. That is antithesis of "free thinking" my friend :p.

Let me ask. How many video game ad do you see per day on TV? If this number is low, why is that? Maybe ad on TV just isn't effective to begin with?

The reason why influencers marketing is generally effective for niche games is because followers are actual target audience. If I am a horror game player, I would follow horror game streamer. So whenever this streamer play a horror game this game gained exposure to the correct target audience.

This does not apply to TV ads. Whenever an ad is played on TV the audience may be my dad, grandma, my mom who doesn't play video games. So it's not really cost efficient. It works better for products or games with a wider target audience, but not niche games from smaller dev.

Facebook ad is a little but more accurate that TV ad when it comes to finding the right audience, but it is not that good either.



Maybe this was the case many years ago but it is certainly false now. Most of the successful KS campaign from an unknown IP/creator requires months of traffic before they gain enough exposure for a successful campaign.

How do I know? I was in a successful KS campaign and I can tell you the amount of marketing that needs to be done before a successful campaign is almost unreal.



I can't comment on the accuracy of this because I haven't read it. But let me tell you a fact: Every PR company that contacted me in the past talked about how many influencers that they have in their database. If influencers marketing isn't a big part of their PR campaign, why would people stress over it? Why would influencers marketing websites like Woovit being popular among smaller devs if it's not effective?

If you still doubt the credibility, this is an article that you can read:
https://www.venturebeat.com/2018/04/15/slay-the-spire-has-china-to-thank-for-launching-its-700000-sales-in-steam-early-access/amp/

This is a game that went from selling 2000 copies in the 1st week to 1.5m thanks to streamers.


It's not more subjective than downright rejecting the effectiveness of influencers marketing with zero data ONLY because you personally dislike streamers. :P

But you are a fan. You've clearly stated that. You've stated that you watch them and get emotionally invested in them, which is pretty deep and not something somebody does who just channel surfs.


Me personally? None. I don't watch TV. I get my ads from my usual websites. Ones that existed long before streamers yet still flourish.


Same with web sites and news channels. Can get just as much information there.


It depends on who watches. That's how ads got around for a long time and there is nothing that says it's any less effective now.


So because your campaign didn't gain traction, that means all campaigns won't?


This is hearsay evidence.


World of Warcraft topped at 12M players without streamers. Since streamers, it's less than half.


I'm not rejecting their effectiveness because I dislike them. This response is very typical from streamer fans and I actually expected you to say it too. I reject their effectiveness because people such as yourself like to read too much into it. For example, one streamer went from WoW to FFXIV and people believed that he was the cause of it, completely ignoring the fact that the company was under extremely heavy fire at the time and the last 2 expansions were total crap, (so people were already jumping ship) that the competition looked that much more appealing. Streamer fans like to take those pieces of circumstantial evidence and make wild claims in their regards.

With that same mindset, I can claim that the reason 3 managers were fired in my company in the past week was because I happened to talk to all 3 prior. That cannot possibly be a huge coincidence.

Streamers also cause a lot of damage to the gaming world. They draw abnormal concentrations of sheeple to servers, causing queue times to get to a point where people give up and don't want to play. Their sheeple run around causing spam. Example, being on the server with a streamer and seeing people spam the trade chat with "invite to streamer party!" while you're trying to sift through to important messages.

They also cause people to invent accolades for them, attempting to give them credit for things they didn't do, case in point, what you've attempted.

I don't need data as the onus isn't on me. And the only thing you've really accomplished here is reinforce that they create sheeple and deter free thinkers, so I thank you for backing me up. Sure, additional ways of advertising may help draw in more money but it does not and certainly has not shown to help improve quality.

So watch stream=fan? Okay. Even if I'm a "fan" I think it's the result of data and money more than feels.

Several sources provided data for such conclusion. For example here:

https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing/amp/#toc-1

-Influencer marketing has grown to $13.8 billion in 2021.
-Businesses are making $5.78 ROI for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
-There has been a 465% increase in searches for the phrase "influencer marketing" on Google alone since 2016.

That alone is enough to support the effectiveness: when business person make decisions on how to spend their marketing budget, they pick the option with the best return with their investment.



I don't think we are talking about the same thing. I'm not talking about how YOU personally get news. I'm asking if you are selling a game to a niche audience, how are you going to gain exposure to the TA in a cost efficient way?

You haven't answer that question.


Sure, they existed, doesn't mean they can't be replaced.

Business person will find newer and more cost efficient way to advertise. Whatever that worked before doesn't mean that can't be replaced with something else.


It depends on your product and your TA. Not all forms of ad are equally effective on everything. Influencer marketing is simply a different option that can be effective on some products.



I did not say that....

Obviously for campaigns with a well known IP/creator or IF their product is absolutely amazing, they will gain attention with minimal effort on marketing.

But for everyone else, they have use what they have to win the battle.

So yeah, if data says influencer marketing has $5 ROI for every $1 spent then why wouldn't I use it?



Except wow isn't "small dev" that I was talking about. Wow is from a well known IP from a wealthy dev.

And MMO playerbase dropping is a completely different discussion from advertising methods.


I'm not participating in this discussion from a followers pov though. I'm posting entirely from a business/advertising pov.

There many ways to advertise, I agree. But if data shows certain way is effective, why wouldn't I use it? Why would I spent unhealthy amount of money on TV ad when the same can be accomplished with even lower cost?

I am not really interested in arguing moral about streaming, since it's mostly subjective. It's either an effective tool to advertise or it's not. And data clearly shows it is.


I trust my data and what PR strategy worked in the past more than a random internet stranger that said "hearsay evidence" lol.