Genuinely, What am I missing?

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Originally Posted by SubmarineAlt

What you're missing is a chip on your shoulder. Some misguided people played for only the story, and they felt that the most recent expansion's story wasn't up to par, so now their shoulders are in need of repair.

If you're having fun, keep having fun. The opinions of others shouldn't matter to you.

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Nice strawman fallacy. I swear, did literally nobody ever take a debate course in HS or college? You're also falling into the "either/or fallacy". There are people, such as myself, who both play for the story AND enjoy the battle content. It's the story that gives that content context, which is important to many people. Regardless of it being objectively up to par, you're trying to divide people into ONLY two binary camps when it's actually a spectrum. This game can have both good battle content AND a good story, and people can enjoy both, or neither. It's not a binary choice. There are people who are disappointed with both, and that's our right to feel that way.

You and I do agree on one thing, though... this is all completely irrelevant to OP, at this moment in their game experience.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

There's a ton of things to do in this game and a lot of it is still genuinely fun to experience. The problems discussed in here don't really get felt until you catch up and run out of stuff you want to do (or when they change a job in a way you don't like)

As a ShB baby I recall someone shout chatting in Eulemore one night about the patch cadence during 5.4-5.5 and thinking "don't really see what's wrong with it, dude maybe needs to take a break", but nowadays I get what they were talking about.

The game's probably better as a place to visit, not to live in.

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I know we are in disagreement on BLM in that other thread, but honestly... you and I are actually of the same mind here. Sadly... I do now think of it as a nice place to visit, but not to live.

Nah, there's a ton to do when you're a newer player. It's just hard to keep long-term players interested as they've done everything they were interested in by now. Honestly, I think every MMORPG has this issue.

What you are (probably) 'not' seeing (and simply won't be able to, and in some cases might never have to:

Is that the game has changed as compared with a lot of very long time veterans used to enjoy
- A 'lot' less individuality between jobs.
- with that a lot less challenge within jobs at 'all' content levels.
- utter destruction of the 'value' underpinning roles, (tank vs healer vs DPS) 'especially' healing (at all levels)
- loss of a confidence of being in a game where the devs care/connect/are listening and will. (no progress on long asked for but always hoped for improvements of every imaginable sort. Unwanted changes, quality of life, glamour/hair, graphics changes, basically EVERY type of feeback seems to be ignored when once XIV players were smug about how we had great devs and WoW didn't.)
- a new sense of vulnerability and almost fear connected to the above
- Less content (longer patch cycles but with the same content)
- much, much, less innovation in new paradigms of content than there once was. (there are exceptions but they are 'rare' exceptions). Once upon a time they introduced totally new content. Now they keep reskinning that same content and expect it to be as popular when it was first landed.
- recent innovations in content have had flaws severe enough so as to upset as many players as they pleased if not more, leading to those potential wins adding up to a loss for far more people than they were wins (Criterion/chaotic/island-sanctuary)
- failure to adequately improve upon those flaws (see worsening of confidence in devs and feedback, the hope that perhaps there never should have been, but was there, is now gone. Thats new)
- new phenomenon of unstable and unhealthy server populations for many types of content, caused by the new functionality of DC travel, which was not accompanied by the necessary support features such as cross-DC party-finder. This has lead to the wholesale and never ending slaughter of social groups as 'raiding' DC favoured by chance alone, parasite and cannibalise the unfavoured DCs. Understand this is continuing state of affairs, equilibrium is impossible (see again dev confidence, and loss of hope)
- the actual change of old playable content to make it more compatible with the newly implemented solo modes of that content. This taking the form of 'streamlining' which has added up to 'boringification' of that content.
- an utter cliff drop nose dive in the quality of all story writing in the game, starting with around Endwalker post. Applies to all MSQ and side quests, role quests, etc....
- material change in the quality of social interactions between players, for reasons which are down to the many causes of dissatisfaction (and I suspect an influx of console players with different expectations of investment in the game and its social opportunities)
- the 'arrival' of these problems is concentrated and new for many players that are long time players (4 years?) but perhaps not veteran, as while the problems have grown slowly over time, it takes a long LONG time to hit end game, and many of these problems only apply once you do hit end game, leading to a short/sharp/shock, and a worse shock now than what was once the case.
- As innovations (surprises to adapt to) have lessened, and the casual game has in the main been made easier in myriad ways, this has led to what was the midcore casual content now only being useful for the needs of 'super' casual players. The game used to have midcore content. There is now almost none to be found in an expansion at all whatsoever. (Casual is anything that does not require scheduling/advanced-preparation/study/etc. Do it on on a whim content at your personal convenience around your life. Midcore means challenge. Midcore casual.)

Is that the community you knew and/or the actual named people in it has changed

- the prevalence of 3rd party addons has exploded.
- glam is no longer relevant the way it once was to many players, affecting the content they participate in. (you don't need to collect anything, yo ucan just use addons to communicate your chosen appearance to other users of that add-on
- There are whole (and large) new communities of types of players with interests, with which the older established types of players are now far less likely to have as much in common with. (adult clubs, ERP, etc.)
- A thinning out of the sprout class and their interests as numbers of new players coming through to end game players declines, and who are becoming more of a minority, and this is exacerbated by the 'new' larger numbers of servers sharing a population that hasn't sustained growth of the same proportion as those numbers of new servers/DCs/Regions.
-social groups used to be cohesive in nature with deep connections. Those cohesive social groups with deep connections have now been replaced with more fleeting less connected groups, as people don't stay subbed, they come and go, and there is an expectation even while new relationships are formed that those will quite only be temporary, affecting how 'new' relationships are now conducted from the outset.

Welcome to the game and the forums! It's good to see you've been enjoying yourself.

The thing with the state of the forums and chunks of the playerbase is that there's multiple things coalescing in one big depression pile right now.

I'll try to keep every aspect brief, but hopefully enough to have you up to speed as to why things are the way they are around here.

1. The Story "Ended", and the next chapter feels lacking.
Endwalker was already a bit of a... let's say, controversial ending to the story. All throughout A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers, they've been building up more and more lore. Such as "The Twelve", which is directly related to 1.0 for example, getting a "who they are and where they're going" conclusion that for a lot of people, including myself, felt extremely disappointing. I don't want to spoil things, of course, but as they effectively crammed two expansion stories into one, it feels like specific things did not get the time to breathe at all, resolved almost entirely offscreen, and since they're now for the most part "resolved", it feels like that part of the journey was just entirely wasted. The patches for Endwalker then focused on a new character, which was basically just a line of sidequests before very hastily going "oh, right, Dawntrail needs to start" in the very last set of patches.

With this, the writing was on the wall, but a lot of us were still more than ready to give Dawntrail a shot, and what we got was... well, I won't speak for everyone - just myself - but what we got was boring, out of character tripe where the entire story falls flat on its face because if you stop for one second during every action setpiece and think about it, just a little more thoroughly... nothing matters. The story would've effectively resolved itself if our character hadn't gotten involved. Couple that with getting paired with a single character nigh-constantly and you get a recipe for disaster, because if you don't like the character... tough shit. Imagine for a minute you didn't like Haurchefant, but the plot basically bends over itself constantly to constantly make him the most effective character in every situation and his screentime was constant. That's basically explaining how Dawntrail feels. Again, some like that character, and so they probably enjoyed the story a lot more! But for others, the story went from a highlight to a consistent feeling of dread of knowing exactly what's going to happen. That's Wuk Lamat.

2. Gameplay reduction
This is where "reminiscing about the glory days" mostly comes in. the short of it is, back in the day, we actually had multiple jobs that played largely differently. I see your main class is set to White Mage. White Mage actually used to have two damage over times instead of just the one, and Astrologian wasn't basically the same job as it! And I see you also play Black Mage. I'm not super familiar with Black Mage myself, but you know those upkeep timers you have on that class? That's gonna be gone soon. "To make it less stressful."
This has been a gradual shift, where the jobs become more and more similar to one another, with more job-specific traits being taken away. Now, you can easily be good with any job, but it comes at the cost of... well, feeling satisfied with that result, really. Personal satisfaction is no longer the endgoal, it's now just routine work.
To put it into perspective, when I first started playing, Bards were practically essential. Lucid Dreaming wasn't a given on any caster, and for long fights, their MP wasn't self-sufficient by design. So a bard had to come around, play the MP regen song which shared their MP with the rest of the party, and keep everyone going. There was also TP, which was basically physical attack MP. It was different, but moreover, it felt like everyone had a role to play.
Now, that role to play has largely been put in the encounter design. People in green go there, people in blue stand here, people in red do this and that - but it starts and ends with encounter design, the jobs themselves never play a part anymore. This has been a gradual shift in the way the game is played, and it feels like it's largely a game now where the focus is on making bigger, flashier attacks, rather than an actual, more fulfilling gameplay experience.
To put this shift in game design into perspective, I want you to know that the developers had no qualms whatsoever about making Bard's songs *not buff the party* anymore in Shadowbringers, which is frankly an insane direction to take in both the job's in-universe lore and the fact that people had been playing bard with buffs for upwards several expansions by that point.

3. Not enough content/Content being stale
I'm combining these into one section because I think they feed into one another pretty well.
So basically, in Shadowbringers, they slowed development down a bit because of factors. That's all fine and good, and stuff happens, you know?
But also, cuts were being made. Per-patch dungeon cadence went from 2 to 1, job quests were getting too much apparently, so they were turned into role quests instead, which... yknow, opinions are mixed on.
Stormblood also had Eureka, which was a new thing, and was massively complained about, but after the developers took criticism into account a lot of us, including myself, enjoyed the later zones. Then Bozja did it again, which I personally wasn't too into, but I know a lot enjoyed that. Endwalker cut that completely, and instead gave us... Island Sanctuary! Which was basically a worse version of the gathering we already had in the game coupled with a spreadsheet simulator. Some enjoyed it, others didn't. It was pretty easy to get into though, and it basically played itself. But it playing itself meant... there wasn't really anything to actually do on it.
With no more optional patch dungeons, and then in Endwalker all the trials being tied to the plot, it meant that when you were done with MSQ, that was... kinda it for each patch? There was no more massive zone to do your relic grind in, instead you just put in those tomestones you've been getting from doing the single dungeon. The alliance raids weren't up to people's enjoyment either.
For Dawntrail, it was basically marketed as "we're getting better! Look at all the stuff we're bringing back!" but the more we're finally seeing in the live letters, the more it seems to be doing the same things we've seen before. It all feels samey now. The dungeons are exactly what you expect, the tribe quests are exactly what you expect, the exploratory zone just looks like another Eureka that's centered all around farming FATEs which is what most people who are into that type of stuff *have been doing already*, the cosmic exploration thing in the live letter was mostly just hitting rocks, sometimes in a mech. And it's more spaced out than eeeeever before. Like, Heaven on High and the second map of Eureka (out of 4!) launched in the same patch series, but now they're saying that for the new thing, they can't do more than two maps because they're also working on the Deep Dungeon (which is what Heaven on High is). It's making a lot of us do a double take and go "wait, huh?"
And don't get me wrong, I don't advocate the developers overworking, but... that's what the increased time between patches was supposed to be for. Not making the patches also have less content.

4. How all this ties into the comparisons to XIV 1.0 and the fear of WoW
The comparisons being made to XIV 1.0 aren't so much towards the game itself as of right now, but towards what appears to be the mindset of the developer. There's a GDC talk with Naoki Yoshida, Yoshi-P, about the mindset going into XIV 1.0 and the mindset he had in creating 2.0, learning from the mistakes that were made in 1.0. The mistakes basically come down to complacency; a Square Enix that, still hot off the heels of the massive success that was Final Fantasy XI, its prior MMO, decided that they just needed to do the same thing but with prettier graphics. But in doing so, they weren't taking into account how the game industry had changed over the last 8 years. The last console generation. Now, we're still on a Heavensward release model, an expansion that launched nearly 10 years ago now, and nothing has changed... but the industry once again very much has changed. More and more games are MMOlike in terms of how much they want your attention, and how much they want you to have them as their main game. Final Fantasy XIV has not adapted to this in the slightest, because they were still massively successful. But with the success, that was inherently moreso "the number 1 is faltering and people are flooding to the number 2", the team at SE did not lock in and decide to go all in to retain these players, instead feeling like they can just coast by as they've been doing. Hence, the game feels stagnating. The flood of players is all but gone, returned to WoW, and the danger is that this time, they may take an already annoyed playerbase in XIV with them. And WoW has since learned to adapt. They saw the failing and the exodus, and they started working to retain current players and get their old players back. What's more though, they seem to have decided to strike at the heart of XIV, finally working on actual player housing, making jabs at the housing situation as it is on XIV currently, and arguably having the potential to do it much better. They introduced warbands so that playing multiple characters is very close to playing multiple jobs on here, working on making a more solo-able experience and they've even decided to put narrative further to the front with a 3-expansion long saga. On top of that, they've committed to trying to speed up the content cadence without trying to lose the content they already have. At this point, I fully expect some kind of catboy/girl race to start existing in Azeroth to attempt to get even more players over so that they can keep playing their catpeople in a game that feels more alive.

5. Yoshi-P and Controversy.
No, Yoshi is not a controversial person in the sense he did something. It's more the opposite, he's starting to face some disdain from a section of the playerbase for not reacting to... just about anything. For example, Final Fantasy XIV has had a bit of a stalker problem for a while. It's not entirely his fault of course, you can't necessarily control the actions of the playerbase, but there's some completely offkey things like how the friends list, for example, only removes people one way. "So as to not hurt their feelings." And when they finally made a step to alleviate the issue by making blacklisting blacklist an entire service account, they did it in the worst way possible. They did it by broadcasting the player's unique account identifier to the client. This means that with a liiiittle bit of tinkering, you can basically make a stalker database that tracks everyone's character name to the player, and it's remarkably easy to do so. Whoopsies? The initial response to this? Weeks of silence, before finally saying that they will... ask the players using this to please stop. Wow! After that, they finally admitted defeat in a live letter, and did mention that they're going to implement better security. We didn't hear about it in the last live letter, and honestly, it's been months now. The database is likely extremely comprehensive. They waited far too long. And I haven't logged into my alts to stay off the stalker database, so I can't even enjoy *that* part of the game right now. Whiiiiich sucks!

There's also the other shenanigans, such as Viera hats which "weren't possible" and one solo person made it possible on PC. In fact, that one solo person very quickly updates *every new incompatible hat to be compatible.* It's been since Shadowbringers launch since this issue would've been worked on, and not even a major graphics overhaul is enough for the devs to make some more work.

These are but *some* of the things that have slowly been grinding away at players. Each of them on their own can be considered a minor nitpick, or even only relevant to a certain subset of players, but with every few months, the list seems to grow larger and larger, things do not get addressed for years, players are feeling lied to.

My Own Recent Experience
For my own anecdotal contribution to this massive tangent, I was talking to a friend the other day who wanted me to get back on because we never finished grinding all the endwalker mounts, so there's still content for me to do. But the thing is... I didn't buy Dawntrail to play more Endwalker. I bought Dawntrail to play Dawntrail. And there's not been any Dawntrail to play. That sucks! I played Endwalker for years already. I want to sink my teeth into something new, and I did pay both for the new expansion and my subscription, you know? At this point, resubbing for patches is just... paying my subscription, because they carefully space out all the content to be a month away from each other, leading to playing for a day, realising I've wasted my money because I could've finally bought Red Dead Redemption 2 and played that instead, and feeling stupid for it.

That's not to say the journey wasn't enjoyable up to a certain point, but I've been caught up with the game since before Stormblood released, and honestly, sometimes I wish I was a newcomer to the game now, because I feel jealous of you being able to enjoy all of this, continuously, without months of waiting. Without 4 months inbetween story chapters. After all this, I will still genuinely advise you to just... stay off the forums. For now. Find some people who don't complain about the state of the game instead, and go have fun! I reckon it's probably best to only get so deeply involved with all of this once you're all caught up. Have a good time! Form your own opinion on the story. But also, don't feel like you owe anything to the game. Dip once you're no longer feeling like you're enjoying it. You'll inevitably reach that point you had with MTG where it feels like the devs don't care about you, but right now... you're a new player. But, if you're put off by the fact that eventually, the devs will see you as someone they don't need to care to retain, then... Yeah. I'm sorry, but unfortunately that just appears to be the case with a lot of long, on-going games. I hate it too :(

In closing, there is, of course, far more to say, such as what Gurgeh above me has to say about the community changes as well, but I genuinely hope this long tangent of mine helps you understand why things are the way they are right now.

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Originally Posted by Lizzit

I understand that, but I still want to hear about them as to why and get a better perspective. I've missed 10+ years of this game and just want to know more. I'm not letting others thoughts on the state of the game influence my own. I just want more context I suppose.

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I think the context is quite complex and has various branches. Some key ones include:

The game had a large influx of players around COVID. The bulk of those players have now hit endgame and discovered that the release of new content is on such a slow cadence that they have run out of stuff to do that interests them.

Players who have been around for longer that that have multiple issues related to the gradual evolution in game and job design, and frustrations that have been building for a while have now burst the dam.

A significant fraction of veteran players had an extremely negative reaction to the Dawntrail story.

Patience has run out on several issues and requests that have received the "we're working on it" response from SQEX for several years.

Unless you no-life FFXIV, I imagine and hope you have a couple of years of enjoyment at least before you run into these problems. Or depending on your personal preferences, you may find you have no issues at all.

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Originally Posted by Lizzit

I like to log on here some mornings at work once and a while to see if I can find any fun tips or strats as I'm exploring through the world of Eorzea. Yet, every time I log on here (or to a lesser extent try to watch anything about the game on YouTube) I see nothing but disdain and very vocal harsh criticisms.

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The forums have always been full of negativity. Back in 2019 I was posting here as well. At the end of the day, most people don't bother posting on the forums unless they are unhappy about something. Also, posters on forums are often not professionals, so they say some pretty harsh and impolite things. To be completely honest with you, being on these forums can make someone who is positive feel pretty depressed about the game. So it's not a good idea to read the forums unless you're the type of person that can handle that and not let it affect you. I can handle it because I'm a naturally positive person, so after posting here I just actually play the game and have fun like normal.

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I can't see any of it reflected in my own experience. A lot of the criticisms I see appears to be:

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• "boring repetitive content" - they mean it's a script. If you do the same dungeon 20 times, it mostly unfolds the exact same way. The only difference is if you play a different job, or the player dynamics in the dungeon (such as them getting killed). They've slowly made it harder for them to mess up by giving more survival tools though, you see.
• "not enough content" - this is mainly an issue for veteran players. New players have plenty. A lot of the people who say it don't actually do all of the content, either (for example, they avoid High-End duties such as Extremes). So they want more non-raid type content that isn't exactly the same every time.
• "the devs playing it too safe" - They actually admitted quite recently they played it safe with which mechanics they add and are going back to Heavensward style designs for bosses. There is some evidence of that in the latest expansion, but it still remains to be seen.
• "wuk lamat(?)" - You will see when you get through the most recent MSQ. The biggest complaint people have is she features too much at the expense of other characters.
• "reminiscing of the glory days" - This is common for any long-running MMORPG game, because they change over time.
• "not enough reciprocation from developers, "live letters" being too stale, not feeling heard" - Live Letters are how they talk to us, but it's one-sided and there's not really acknowledgement of the feedback here, despite that they ask us to post feedback here regularly.
• "current raids aren't rewarding enough" - They agreed and said they are addressing certain raids not being rewarding enough. But it ultimately depends if a person sees value in the reward. If they don't, then from their perspective, it won't be rewarding enough.

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Is this all I have to look forward to?

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It's common for "long-time" players of an MMORPG to experience burnout and nostalgia for "the old days". Whether you will depends on you really. Maybe you will experience this same burnout someday, but I would suggest enjoying the game until that time actually comes.

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Should I just stop playing the game after Shadowbringers? After the peak of Shadowbringers the quality just drops off a cliff?

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You should at least play through Endwalker. Some people did not like its quality, but for many, it was actually their favorite story above Shadowbringers. So it depends who you ask.

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That being said, what am I missing? I want to be filled in as to why the community feels this way. I want a better perspective so I can understand I don't want pointless baseless accusations; I want statements and I want a "i feel x way because of y," or "because of x change from however many years ago." I understand some players have been playing for over 10 years (which is a lot of time!) so I will be taking longtime players thoughts and criticisms to heart the most.

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I've played for 10 years. What I said above are some of the reasons.

A big issue that has caused a lot of veteran players to quit are job simplifications. Simply put, jobs used to be full of bloat that felt "buggy" or "useless" or "unpolished". They had a lot of very challenging mechanics: we had "keep-up" buffs/meters and if they fell off we lost a lot of damage and abilities, positionals contributed a lot more damage, elements were removed, damage vulnerabilities used to mean some jobs benefitted from other jobs being there, players could regen eachother's MP and TP and influence their enmity, it was easier to mess up and press something at the wrong time, combos expired after 3 seconds, ranged attacks interrupted combos, you had to face a target to auto/block, Warrior's Raw Intuition would parry from front but crit from behind. Tanks had stances and would stance dance between damage and mitigation.

There was a lot of sophistication in the jobs, but now it's been reduced to where someone brand new to the game can play it correctly and understand how it works. To achieve this, you mostly just press press what lights up and press any abilities on cooldown. A lot of these players valued the sophistication and it was their reason for playing.

There are lots of other little issues, such as menus have been added to for years and never condensed, there is no incentive to do old Extreme and Savage raids, old content doesn't always sync well (should use Minimum Item Level settings), housing is limited despite that other MMORPGs do not have this issue, they have infrastructure excuses for why they can't do things and relatively simple tasks fixed by the modding community are difficult for the developers to fix, abilities don't feel good to press at high pings, casts can only affect like 32 targets and amount of buffs are limited in large-scale content, etc.

There are always going to be issues though, with any software. It's just a lot of these have been issues for most of the game's life yet completely ignored and allowed to persist.

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Originally Posted by Lizzit

That being said, what am I missing? I want to be filled in as to why the community feels this way. I want a better perspective so I can understand I don't want pointless baseless accusations; I want statements and I want a "i feel x way because of y," or "because of x change from however many years ago." I understand some players have been playing for over 10 years (which is a lot of time!) so I will be taking longtime players thoughts and criticisms to heart the most.

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A lot of the complaints are about the endgame content. As someone that began fairly recently and has a lot to catch up, you probably won't see those problems for a long time. But for long time players, or any people that was up date with the content during ShB or earlier expansions, the difference in the content that EW brought and DT carried on has been staggering. In the past, give content that you can easily do, but also content for people that wanted to nolife on the game. But content with shelf life disappeared, and with that every other problems became more and more obvious. Relics served as that content for those people. In SB, you needed about 30 hours of content dedicated to that to complete ONE relic. With ShB, it was a little less, but not so far. In EW, it took 1500 tomestones you probably already had before the content released. Your first relic was basically given to you, and by just playing other content, you got relics as a gift.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

For a little more of a detailed answer, for many players they had been playing when the game demanded a lot out of you, so it was capable of keeping you occupied for very extensive periods of time, and this was even without needing to diversify your content consumption. For instance in the days of HW/SB, you could comfortably just do crafting, and nothing but crafting (and it would keep you entertained and occupied outside of the number dopamine that consumes modern crafting). The game generally speaking would demand your attention a lot more, and for people looking for that, it was an amazing game, I am one such example.

The game since then has streamlined more, so activities like crafting no longer really demand what it used to, but is now a much more approachable content type.. Obviously this is something else where it's very much preferential.. Do you want something that you feel like you can drown in? Do you want something that you can maybe play a couple hours here and there on a weekday.

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Part of that is also the community though. Back in the day we didn't have tools like Teamcraft that could sim and custom build entire rotations for you to 100% your craft every time. You had to learn the interplay and push and pull between the various crafting states and maximize your resources to HQ your crafts. Yes we had more HQ mats and such, but the system overall hasn't changed much.

The community goes out of its way to simplify everything into a rote and direct way of doing things and then complains when SE takes that as feedback that we want things simplified.

Needless to say, you can't make everyone happy all the time.

OP, if you're having fun, simply keep playing and maybe consider joining an FC or one of the various XIV Discords for tips and tricks and community. The forums are where people come to yell at SE.

Are you having fun? Then keep playing. Even if you did come to a point where you have dissatisfaction later, you'll have the enjoyment and experiences before that.

I've been playing for 11 years in May. The game has changed over time. Some things I liked. Some things I didn't like. I've given feedback to SE in both cases. But I still play because I'm still enjoying myself. If I come to a point where I'm not enjoying what I'm doing, I won't do it anymore.

There's no guarantee that anything that bugs some people now will bug you when you get to the same place. Always make your own decisions based on what makes you happy.

Don't ignore the complaints. Play the game yourself and see if you agree or not. The main reason these complaints exist is Square Enix completely ignoring them. People advising you to do the same are part of the reason why FFXIV is seeing a record number of players leaving.

You can still enjoy all the content up until Endwalker. The reason people are still here complaining is that the game was good to begin with. They wouldn’t have engaged with it if they never liked it.

The forums right now reflect the direction the game is heading. Dawntrail's MSQ had the worst reception of any expansion, and patch cycles are getting longer with each one of them. Players now have to wait almost five months for a new patch, only to get content that is either extremely predictable, disappointing, or both.

FFXIV has lost its ability to create fresh and fun content. Every new piece of content introduced since Shadowbringers has flopped: Island Sanctuary, Criterion Dungeons and Chaotic Raids. The successful content — like Field Operations, Savage, and Ultimate — has been recycled across multiple expansions, with SE struggling to even make them look different from their past versions.

There are also other major issues, like job homogenization and how SE handles third-party tools. The game has been running for years with high-latency players at a huge disadvantage, yet they are not allowed to use tools to fix it. There’s no built-in damage meter, and every discussion between the dev team and raiders feels like a childish argument, while SE turns a blind eye to the fact that players are using third-party meters anyway.