Thoughts on the 9th Vana'diel Census

1) Wasn't this supposed to be out, like, a month ago?

2) Login data:

Most logins in a representative April, 2009 week: Right around Japanese Midnight, which would seem to indicate that the bulk of players who _actually play_ are Japanese. There's a much smaller bump around US primetime (Japanese noon-ish), but the bulk of players do seem to be Japanese, with the predictable increase in logins once we hit the weekend.

Amount of time on? Almost 86%, less than 3 hours a day. But there's more to that, as we'll get to later. Average play time per character per day is down about 1/3 -- from about 3 hours a day, to about 2 (171 to 126 minutes).

3) Over sixty-two percent of all characters are level 1.

3 out of 5 characters, thence, are either new, mules, or some form of RMT.

Keep this in mind: I see this as a major take-home point.

4) Relic weapons:

There are 3,245 relics in the game.

5) Mythic weapons:

There are only 43 completed Mythics in the game. None of them are Polearms, Guns, or Axes.

Eight different Mythic weapons are currently absolutely unique in Vana'diel -- only one player has one of them.

6) Economics and the (questionable) legality of merc'ing (and especially what the mega-gillionaire do to get and spend their cash)...

I feared we'd have to visit this again, as I had a talk about this in-game several weeks back, and now I see it as a major situation within Vana'diel.

3/4 of all the players don't make 100,000 gil a week.

But for those few who claim to make upwards of 10 million gil, mercing (selling the right to gain exclusive items) becomes one major part of gil acquisition and income. "Other", which basically leaves the possibility of illegal conduct wide open, is another.

In fact, for the uber-gillionaires: Over 30% of the income they gain has no obviously identifiable source (not monsters, items, gardening, synthesis, mercing, etc.)... HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM....

And when you get to how it's spent, once you get to the ridiculous levels, you find that similarly unidentifiable sources take up about a quarter of how mega-gillionaires spend their gil...

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM....

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

7) Expansion progress:

Zilart: About 80% are to the Ark Angel situation.

CoP: A little over 40% are done, a little over a third aren't started. Leaves very few for the Ouryu fight... (HINT!)

ToAU: About a quarter are finished. About a quarter just made sure they could get access to the area and the "benefits" of being a mercenary... All over the map otherwise.

Wings: Only about 1 character in 8 who has Wings access is caught up. About half have not even completed the first mission and quest set -- and most of the remainder are only on "Cait Sith".

(This would appear to indicate that most players believe the Wings mission storyline set is way too hard.)

8) They say they are working on something to deal with the RMT /tell advertisements. I'll believe it as I see it.

Why??

The take home point...

9) FFXI claims 2.34 million characters. If this is the case, then approximately 1,450,000 of these characters are level 1.

Someone please tell me how one can draw any other conclusion that the number of Dispose-a-Characters is a very significant fraction of this latter number (as in: Hundreds of Thousands of Dispose-a-Characters)...

Hoo boy...