does anyone else not play xiv as much as before after dt?

To me personally it started happening after 6.1. Slowly kept playing less and less. When DT hit it kind of met my every expectation on how stagnant the game would be so this is ended up me dragging a game that already made me feel jaded for a couple of years.

Post EW was when I felt it, but I fell back on eureka...now there's nothing but ultimates and I like staying sane....
I threw myself at chaotic cause I NEEDED the hair...I got sick of waiting for years to shit become unsyncable...(I doubt chaotic will be)

Now I'm tired...I wish I could erase my memory and be a sprout again...or play Bloodborne or BG3 again...sigh..

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

I genuinely think we should have reached a point when we stopped calling this graphical update an actual update.

Most character models have been made worse or literally the same as before, almost all areas that were "updated" have their sky filled with a weird thick fog, sea of clouds is a great example of that as I mentioned earlier in this thread or another I'm not sure, those things amongst other negatives of this ""update"".

The game in general isnt any better because of this so called graphical update, the time they spent on this mediocre update could have been used for literally anything else but this.

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Objectively, the game is better, particularly in ARR zones. I also happen to like my character.

At the moment yes, but I’ve been playing for 14 years and I’m a little burnt out. It happens. Most people get burnt out after doing something continuously for that long.

Endwalker was when I started to slow play less and less. So many of my friends were crying about how great Endwalker's ending was and I was in the minority going "This entire expansion felt super rushed..." I still enjoyed it but it didn't really "hit" for me like it was suppose to I guess. Then Endwalker's post-story happened and it gradually got worse and worse, and then once 6.5 came out I stopped playing for over a year because the entire Post-patch story was just that bad to me personally as I saw it as them essentially turning a incredibly important place in FF14 [The void as a whole], which legitimately should've been it's own expansion, into a speedrun of FF4's villains and teaching someone that the power of friendship overcomes everything and anything...after we just got done punching the embodiment of despair in the face and showing that the power of friendship overcomes anything and everything.

Then Dawntrail came out and genuinely made me go "I wish I wasn't so hard on Endwalker" because somehow everything I didn't like about Endwalker was even worse in Dawntrail. Story was even worse and had baffling decisions made for it. Most of the characters presented were worse/hollow shells. I very much enjoyed my initial play-through of Dawntrail quite a lot, even if it was mainly due to the dungeons / trial fights being great. But once I actually asked myself "Is this story, the main reason so many people play this game to begin with, actually that good?" it all fell apart really quickly for me and I haven't touched the game much since then. I re-subbed for 7.0 launch day, beat it, did some of the side stuff, unsubscribed, then only came back recently to do 7.1/7.15 stuff and I barely have the motivation to do it either since nothing has really changed much overall since launch.

Factor in things like lack of content [which is subjective], job balance, graphics "update" [I don't know about many of you but I genuinely cannot tell the difference in most cases], community responses to everything, and more, and Dawntrail is just a big mess right now for both sides, and people just really don't want to force themselves to deal with it if the devs are going to barely acknowledge any of it themselves. The burnout is only going to get worse too if the devs decide to keep acting like "Everything is going perfectly" as they work on the 7.X patches and just tune out all of the actual feedback / criticisms they have been getting, or interpret it in baffling ways, like how they looked at the Wuk Lamat feedback from 7.0 and somehow came to the conclusion that she was hated because they didn't properly show us why she was such a great and "complex" character and that'd we'd see that in the 7.1 patch and onward.

This has been the least active I've ever been since starting all the way back at the end of 3.0. Even when I took occasional breaks from raiding, I still logged in frequently enough. Outside of a brief spell where a new friend I met wanted to do roulettes, I pretty much raid log. I still cap and run my weeklies because it's something to do, but if it weren't for FRU, I'd serious consider unsubbing for the first time in nearly ten years. The sheer lack of content has gotten ridiculous at this point. Which is a bigger issue for me despite how much I disliked Dawntrail. When I'm actually fall asleep during the MSQ, that speaks volumes to just how disinterested I was--not at all helped when I'm coming off from player Cyberpunk and Baldur's Gate 3. The level of storytelling and character depth in those games just made Dawntrail feel like even more of a slog to get through.

What's sad is I'm not entirely bored with XIV. When I run Jeuno or even Expect, I'm enjoying the game. I just feel very... indifferent towards it, if that makes any sense. I never used to feel that way, but the spark just isn't there anymore. I'm excited to play through BG3 again or look forward to my current Total War: Three Kingdoms campaign. Whereas with XIV, I enjoy FRU and Chaotic, but I'm not excited the way I used to be.

One of my friends drifted away from it pretty noticeably after 7.0, mainly because of the DRG changes. I've been playing considerably less as well. It's just not nearly as much fun to use a good lot of jobs compared to EW or ShB.

I saw a thread that folks were headed back to FFXI because of Dawntrail being the last straw for FFXIV. Gameplay has been on the decline since Shadowbringers and when you take the magic of grand storytelling away from the game, you see the barebones minimum that is being pumped into the game with a handful of months in-between patches and sparsely any content other than exhausting legendary/relic grinding (and coming from GW2 and WoW when I say this, that is not fun content; I've explored both extensively, so I'm not putting it lightly) and maybe going back to help newer players through Eureka, Bozjan, et cetera. The 'vacation' I'm getting is away from FFXIV, which acts as an antithesis to staying subscribed to the game. Simplifying and homogenizing tanks, frontlining the Savage/Chaotic material with barely anything for 92% [or so] of the playerbase (3% being hardcore raiders, much respect to your grit, 4% being to omnicrafters/gatherers with even more respect to that grit, and the remaining 1% being the roleplaying community who fill the void with immersion) apart from gem-and-gil farming. With that in mind, it's not a wonder why the community is in an uproar and the hiatus that took players from other games TO FFXIV [in ShB] are now bleeding back out to the games they left or even on to newer things. What on earth is Square thinking? "Mobile", yes, I know, but still.

Yes, cause grinding Ex trials whose mount i cant buy until the fight is nerfed 3x just feels like a huge waste of time, so many friends stopped playing - it feels a lot less active unless your part of certain communities...

And yeah, the story just felt worse then even, the 6.1-6.5 mess was already... a very mixed bag for something that should have been its own expansion or at very least Turncliff(?)/bozja style, where we get some new story zones to actually travel too. Like how do they justify doing Zeros realm if we cant even revisit it after being done?

Wuk did suck - i dont need to be the center of attention but it was.. just too much. But i admit our german dub did save er at least a bit. On english i whould have stopped i guess lol

With seemingly a lot being burnt out, maybe it’s a good time for SE to just take the game offline for 2 years and upgrade its engine. Make it more long lasting for another 15 years. Everyone will be back more energized and it’s a good investment.