In the fantasy MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, a census has been conducted, revealing numerous statistics.
For the two-year anniversary, Square Enix introduced Patch 3.1 (which we reported on yesterday) and released a plethora of more or less relevant statistics.
According to the English translation, Final Fantasy players have spent 11 million years in the game, or 96,809,761,442 hours, at least that’s what we are led to believe.
However, this number is quite puzzling. If it is accurate and one assumes 5 million accounts, each player would have had to spend an insane amount of time in the game to arrive at such a number. It seems more like there was a mix-up with commas in the translation, somewhere lost in translation.
Fortunately, there are charts and pie charts for the rest! The gender distribution among characters is 50:50 in Japan. In North America, players prefer male characters at 62%. In Europe, it’s the opposite: 64% play female characters.
Clear trend towards the “Human” races, Lalafell only popular in Japan
Surprisingly, there is a strong consensus across countries regarding race selection, with clear favorites. The human-like Hyur are on top (one in three is one of them), followed by the cat-like Miqo’te, who are actually even more popular than the Hyur in Europe at 36%, and are also quite liked in Japan and North America.
In contrast, the gnome-like Lalafell have little popularity outside Japan. The giant Roegadyn and elf-like Elezen enjoy relatively little global acceptance and are more of a choice for connoisseurs. It’s still too early to see how popular the lizard-like Au Ra are, as they only came with Heavensward.
Such behavior is often observed in MMORPGs: Generally, the majority of players are drawn to “attractive,” human-like races. Most MMORPGs with multiple factions strive to provide attractive race options on “both sides,” so that no one realm dominates in numbers.
What does the role distribution look like?
The average character in FF 14 is 28, which is 2 levels higher than in 2014 – back then it was 26.
Interestingly, the role distribution of characters between levels 31 and 60 shows that 62% are damage dealers, while 19% are healers and tanks each. However, this should be taken with caution due to FF 14’s multiclass system.
Regarding the job distribution, Final Fantasy XIV is evidently doing a pretty good job. There are hardly any “unpopular classes,” at least among those that have been in the game longer. They range between 7 and 11%. The 4 relatively new jobs are between 3 and 5%. The most popular classes are the Black Mage and White Mage. Bard and Monk lag behind the “established” jobs with 7%.
You can find significantly more and increasingly obscure statistics in the English source from Dualshockers, which we have linked below. More information about the game can be found on our FF14 thematic page.
