World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog
Guess what, the majority of your playerbase is midcore. Not casual players who have a panic attack when they need to use more than three buttons on their hotbars. Not hardcore players who clear the tier in 16 hours.
Square Enix is on the same trajectory as Blizzard. The sad thing is that the playerbase refuses to see this because of all the blind hype, and this same thing happened in WoW - people couldn't fathom the thought that WoW could be getting worse.
I believe most midcore players will be happy with healers that can do more than two button rotations, for example. People do have brain cells in this game.
FF14 is clearly not catering to the world prog players. So the problem really is the incessant catering of casual players. This will eventually lead to FF14's decline, when you adjust content schedule and delivery to cater to the lowest common denominator, making the traditional midcore crowd dissatisfied and leave. Only reason this is obfuscated is because of all the influx. This game right now is full of new players that have no understanding of the game and have barely participated in the game for more than a tier. And even then I know plenty of WoW players who have quit after literally just one tier because the drought is even worse than in WoW.
People mock WoW's peaks and falls between expansions, but FF14's drops are bigger, sometimes by 50%.
