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

i was hyped beyond belief to play dt and by the end of it i found myself checked out due to the nonsense that went on during the latter half of the story. i used to raid, do extremes, ultimates, eureka and all of that in shb and ew and now i barely log in at all. am i alone in feeling this way?

A lot of people take this game less seriously after experiencing Wuk Lamat's Grand Adventure

It broke the sunk cost fallacy I had with this game, and for that, I'm forever grateful.

I did find myself playing less this expansion, but that could also be because I also completed one of my long term, very big goals recently, and that was one of the primary reasons I was logging in every day. With that goal gone, and being caught up on several things, I haven't had as much reason to be on every day.

I sure don't. Maybe now I play just over an hour a day from it being so boring. Once I get my last 2 jobs to max level it be maybe once a week.

i dont play as much. i do like the fights more than in EW, the mechanic design was never really great for me though.

the story with all the lore was always my number one thing... but i dont feel that at all in DT. normally i couldnt wait for certain sidequests. and yet i still havent done hildibrand or the last meqimeqi quest. i havent finished the pelupelu and i think i already missed one week for the new train. i normally like these kind of quests and do them as soon as possible, but without a great msq which is kinda the main pillar it all feels more bland


and also there is no job i thoroughly enjoy. i played monk in HW and Dragoon in ShB. at the times i loved them so much. and now in DT i play savage as monk, casual stuff as dark knight or schoolar and everything else as dragoon... i dont feel they joy of these jobs anymore though.
maybe i just played this game for too long or maybe its not for me anymore.

but yes i play less ff14 since 7.0.

(and also: the community is unpatient, egocentric and rigid... looking at pf)

I log in to keep my house. I can't even get my tank to insta queue the trials roulette anymore so its stuck at level 91 since I log off after 5 minutes of wondering if its worth it to keep logging in for the house. I did beat DT and M1S-4S savage with my sage but I couldn't even be bothered to get the 8 books for my second weapon, just got the SGE one.

I also let my mentor status lapse as I couldn't be bothered to lvl my jobs to 100 and do the role quests for anything other than the healer. So yeah... I'd say I play a lot less.

Skipping this ultimate... I've done every other one but not this time... No sir. probably not doing T2 Savage. But on the fence about it. Did not farm EX mounts either.

I just can't anymore... nothing changed enough, in fact it only became worse. We are looking at 6 years of the same crap. SHB 2, EW 2 and DT ostensibly another 2. Nah. I'm sympathetic because of the graphics update. I do really appreciate it. But I'm borderline waiting for something to save my interest in the game at this point. Definitely life support.

What's shocking is raiding in Stormblood and playing then was so fun it actually kept me hooked for this long, because that was the funnest expansion I really played (gameplay). I just wrongly assumed we'd get back to that level of development and gameplay. ARR and HW were okay... Stuff in SB just felt new, innovative and complex enough you were actually proud to be good at your main job.

Absolutely.
I logged in everyday even if sometimes only short times during EW luls.
And ofc a lot more before the lul.
However DT MSQ soured FFXIV for me a great bunch.

I took a semi hiatus after finishing the MSQ and found myself logging in once or twice a week.
For like two weeks now I was logging in daily again but am already losing interest once more and skip days.

Yeah. Definitely stopped playing as much ever since Dawntrail.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

I log in to keep my house. I can't even get my tank to insta queue the trials roulette anymore so its stuck at level 91 since I log off after 5 minutes of wondering if its worth it to keep logging in for the house. I did beat DT and M1S-4S savage with my sage but I couldn't even be bothered to get the 8 books for my second weapon, just got the SGE one.

I also let my mentor status lapse as I couldn't be bothered to lvl my jobs to 100 and do the role quests for anything other than the healer. So yeah... I'd say I play a lot less.

Skipping this ultimate... I've done every other one but not this time... No sir. probably not doing T2 Savage. But on the fence about it. Did not farm EX mounts either.

I just can't anymore... nothing changed enough, in fact it only became worse. We are looking at 6 years of the same crap. SHB 2, EW 2 and DT ostensibly another 2. Nah. I'm sympathetic because of the graphics update. I do really appreciate it. But I'm borderline waiting for something to save my interest in the game at this point. Definitely life support.

What's shocking is raiding in Stormblood and playing then was so fun it actually kept me hooked for this long, because that was the funnest expansion I really played (gameplay). I just wrongly assumed we'd get back to that level of development and gameplay. ARR and HW were okay... Stuff in SB just felt new, innovative and complex enough you were actually proud to be good at your main job.

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Even the oh so called "graphical update" was a partial disaster, there is still to this day this weird fog everywhere in areas like the sea of clouds, that used to have a fully clear sky with a beautiful sunset, now they have this very weird fog that ruins the entire sunset and the area around it, it's just filled with a weird thick fog.

The characters (especially miqos) are still as mediocre as they used to be, and some faces look outright creepy to this day even after that update.

I won't squarely place the blame on Dawntrail for having played less. It's two reasons for me mainly.

1. Prolonged content drought

There is literally nothing to do, patches come out after 5 months, and these patches have so little content sometimes you can complete everything at a very casual pace in less than a week. (Especially in Endwalker...) Meanwhile I can boot up a free to play game, and I constantly have goals to work towards, new content coming out every month, and better value for my $15/mo if I were to spend it on them. This is a paid subscription MMORPG, one that's keeping Square Enix afloat. Neglecting it, and pushing your audience away can only end badly. There is nothing for me to do, so I play other games, and have no reason to come back to FFXIV.

2. The community leaves much to be desired

This community prides itself on being "The Best gaming community", while also displaying some of the most entitled, selfish attitudes I have ever seen. This game harbors a dark underworld of stalking, and harassment (Which even persists after changes to Blacklisting). The more normal people quit the game, the more exposed you get to the two extremes you'll see on this game. One side, will bend over backwards for sprouts, and make unreasonable demands of people to accomodate the sprout, and will go out of their way to crucify anyone who makes a percieved transgression towards a new player. Lets stop pretending duty support hasn't been in the game for years... Then you have the Hardcore raiders who are incapable of putting up with even the most trivial of setbacks, and who are incapable of teaching people strategies, and just expect people to know everything, and execute every mechanic flawlessly without failure. The extreme gatekeeping and toxicity in PF's being a prime example of the worst our community has to offer.

When my friends quit playing this game, I'll quit with them - and I probably will not return until 8.0 (Assuming major steps are taken to address current issues that have persisted for several expansions at this point.)

I log in every day still but I wouldn't exactly consider talking with my social circles "gameplay".

I play the game less but not because of the story or anything. The story has its issues, always has had, even if today it's more dire than usual for sure. I've always been a big lore nerd otherwise and I appreciate the lore, with the world building of the game still being the last bastion remaining fully functional. No, I play the game less because the amount of content I seriously take part in has dramatically thinned since I can't be arsed with savage and raiding anymore. Their pve is bland and stale. It's also not what I signed up for when I started playing.

So I do still spend probably as much time as I used to ingame, but actually doing things...? I'm not sure. I still try out their new content when it comes out like the latest chaotic, if just to make my own opinion about it by playing it, so I can then tell what I liked and what I didn't about it. I'll do the same when the next promised content pieces come out.

I've been playing less because there's just not much I feel like doing right now. I still do a few roulettes every couple of days, but until they get around to relics or exploratory zones or something, I'm catching up on other games.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

i was hyped beyond belief to play dt and by the end of it i found myself checked out due to the nonsense that went on during the latter half of the story. i used to raid, do extremes, ultimates, eureka and all of that in shb and ew and now i barely log in at all. am i alone in feeling this way?

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Can you tell us 'why' you think that is though?
(In your case it's not 'clearly' because of content. You must have a gut feeling.)
Friends who happened to leave? Why did they leave?
Burnout and the raiding content was unsustainable and without that?
Why?

I'll provide a slightly different perspective from what has been said so far.

I'm an achievement hunter.
So in those moments when people often say "there is no content" I will dig through the achievement log and still find something to do, because even if I'm currently sitting at 93% completion, there is still a lot of older content I haven't been through yet.
Before Dawntrail released, I had already planned what content to focus on this expansion: I wanted to get all the Endwalker savage and EX mounts unsync, solo Deep Dungeons (and farm Timeworn Artifacts for ShB relics at the same time, because I've spent enough time in Delubrum Reginae already), finally get the Mahjong titles, and start working on the Accursed Hoard grind.
That on top of all the new content, of course.

The reason I became an achievement hunter is not for self-gratification or for flexing titles, it's because I enjoy collecting things, customization, and, most of all, because I want these titles and rewards for my character (I got into fishing only to get the Sea Dragoon title for my DRG, I got the Saint of the Firmament title only because I thought it would make a good AST title, I got to crystal in the first season of Crystal Conflict just for the Crystal Keeper title and then never touched ranked PvP again, etc).
As long as I had my character, I could find something to do, even if people around me were complaining about the 2min meta, the difficulty of raids, the lack or the redundancy of content, etc.

Then came the graphical update, which considerably changed the appearance of the character I've been hunting achievements for.
As a result, all the plans I mentioned have come to an abrupt halt. 7.0 cutscenes were difficult to watch. I can't even take gpose screenshots anymore.
(7.1 addressed some of those issues, but the response from the dev team over the past 8 months has been so ambiguous and poor that I have no idea what to expect from 7.2 or later)

Now I do the "bare minimum" compared to how I used to play.
(it's probably still a lot compared to other people, but sunk cost fallacy got me in its clutches and I gotta spend those leves...)

Job design and job balance are constantly being reworked with each update, the story is constantly progressing with each patch, and new raid designs are released every 6 months or so, so even if I may not be satisfied with the current state they're in, I know that things can/have to/will get better in the future.
I do not share the same optimism about the graphical update, which was a one-time thing, and was countlessly touted as making the game look good enough "for the next 10 years".
(well, compared to stuff that came out this past year, I can already say I highly doubt the new graphics will last that long...)

I've already said it, but what keeps me subbed at the moment is sunk cost fallacy.
But in the current gaming landscape where more and more games want to take more and more of your time everyday with dailies, weeklies, regular updates, stamina, etc, there are only so many games one can afford to play, and FFXIV is being pushed more and more in the background, so even that may not be enough to keep me logged in in the future.

It was Endwalkers lack of content and death of OG Monk that did it for me. I'll do a few roulettes through the week and Savage reclears and be done with it.

The 4 month schedule has really killed it. Taking extra time to release less content just isn't good enough. The game will be dead soon enough if this keeps up. Even the announced content doesn't interest me. Space Island sanctuary and another 100 floor pointless content tower. Nah, I'm good.

Just release more 24 man raids and 8 man trials. Fed up with dungeons, just give me battle content that doesn't involve trash mobs.

DT really made me feel the game was not even taking me seriously as the player anymore, so from my pov it was the game that broke off a formerly strong relationship with me rather than the other way around. I am not blind to when I am being taken for granted. I gave this game my best for years, and it just couldn't be bothered to make an effort for me in return.

I play a lot more than I used to before DT. But I'll attribute that to the fact that finally, after years since I started playing, I was able to make enough time for raiding. So I found a static and started doing high end content and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

If it wasn't for that, I'd say I'd probably login and play equally as often as I did before DT - which was pretty much also every day, but not for a significant amount of time (enough to send out retainers, do a roulette, check in on friends, then log out again).

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Originally Posted by Archeron

I won't squarely place the blame on Dawntrail for having played less. It's two reasons for me mainly.

1. Prolonged content drought

There is literally nothing to do, patches come out after 5 months, and these patches have so little content sometimes you can complete everything at a very casual pace in less than a week. (Especially in Endwalker...) Meanwhile I can boot up a free to play game, and I constantly have goals to work towards, new content coming out every month, and better value for my $15/mo if I were to spend it on them. This is a paid subscription MMORPG, one that's keeping Square Enix afloat. Neglecting it, and pushing your audience away can only end badly. There is nothing for me to do, so I play other games, and have no reason to come back to FFXIV.

2. The community leaves much to be desired

This community prides itself on being "The Best gaming community", while also displaying some of the most entitled, selfish attitudes I have ever seen. This game harbors a dark underworld of stalking, and harassment (Which even persists after changes to Blacklisting). The more normal people quit the game, the more exposed you get to the two extremes you'll see on this game. One side, will bend over backwards for sprouts, and make unreasonable demands of people to accomodate the sprout, and will go out of their way to crucify anyone who makes a percieved transgression towards a new player. Lets stop pretending duty support hasn't been in the game for years... Then you have the Hardcore raiders who are incapable of putting up with even the most trivial of setbacks, and who are incapable of teaching people strategies, and just expect people to know everything, and execute every mechanic flawlessly without failure. The extreme gatekeeping and toxicity in PF's being a prime example of the worst our community has to offer.

When my friends quit playing this game, I'll quit with them - and I probably will not return until 8.0 (Assuming major steps are taken to address current issues that have persisted for several expansions at this point.)

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i can vouch for the toxicity. I literally got doxxed just for pointing it out. And ive been harassed in the game for years by either HC raiders who think its not ok to parse low or members of a certain community who easily point the finger of "phobia" when you disagree with literally anything they say or do

I can't relate. I play it the same amount really. Probably more lately because I got done with some real life distractions.

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

i can vouch for the toxicity. I literally got doxxed just for pointing it out. And ive been harassed in the game for years by either HC raiders who think its not ok to parse low or members of a certain community who easily point the finger of "phobia" when you disagree with literally anything they say or do

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That's not what happened, you got called out for using mods and also for harassing players because they had low parses and making fun of them by hunting their logs page.

Stop derailing threads.

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Originally Posted by UNDEAD10000

I play FFXIV lot less now due to 7.0 graphics update (which is complete mess) that cause my eyes feel very uncomfortable after playing around 45 minutes (i really wish i had ability to turn god afwul FSR off completely, ability to turn certain graphics settings off and of course have a in-game brightness setting) and other reason is that normal group content these days is just so bad and so boring.

Before some start saying to me that the graphics update is just fine and the problem is on my eyes, note that before 7.0 graphics update i did able to play FFXIV +6 hours everyday easily without any problems.

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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.

If I didn’t find how amazing MINE (min ilvl no echo, running old high end content) community is, I would have stopped playing altogether by now.

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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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I must at least in part agree, for something they spent two years hype on, the graphics update has not impressed me much. Scenes do look a little more lively due to them being able to put more items into the zone map, but it's barely even playing catch-up with modern titles not hindered by running on legacy engines. So unless they were going to change out the engine entirely, maybe it would have been better for them to acknowledge that graphics were never going to be something at which this game could match other titles of a decade later, and they should have invested in the gameplay instead?

i used to log in alot but in the last 2 weeks i probably have about 2 hours or less of playtime, i havent even maxed my crafters yet which is usually the first thing i do after clearing the main story

For me, the story soured the experience. Normally I would spend time leveling jobs, not so much this time and most jobs at 100 is due to frontline and Pelupelu.

Did normal raid for 4 weeks on WAR to get the gear, then building rest up with tomes. I did still do roulette for caster gear, but stopped that recently.
This basically leaves me with alliance raid (last coin next week) and two unreal each week that I log in for.
Mostly the other days it's to get a treasure made, maybe a frontline, and then log out.

Overall, I'm spending a lot less time on FFXIV now than pre-DT, and for me the main reason is there's not a lot of things below extremes for longterm grinding.

Even as one of the people who didn’t mind* the story for DT I find very little reason to log in anyway.

I’ve got Pelupelu at max (I think lol), levelled everything I’d reasonably gear/play, do the weekly Jeuno raid. Frontline roulette.

…that’s really it lol. I’ve done PotD, Eureka, Bozja etc when they were actually relevant, so basically because I’ve been playing the game frequently I get punished with having effectively nothing to do unless I have want to wade into the PF Pick-up Hellscape. Think I’d rather just play something else lol…


* Please do not mistake ‘didnt mind’ for ‘fully accepts as a flawless masterwork’. I can think somethings barely passable but also consider it hot trash lol. I mean I’m sure there’s whole niches in literature dedicated to books that are ‘passable’ but also ‘hot trash’ lol (I.e a lot of romance series). Like, it did the job; badly, but it did it. 5/10 for effort lol at least you tried

I certainly play less--I haven't even completed the 7.1 MSQ yet, because I just don't care enough to.

I'm still playing because I still have a 'debt' I want to pay back to my FC (self imposed, they told me multiple times I don't owe them anything), and because I have a personal goal of getting all jobs to 100.

Once all that is done, I'll have no reason to stick around. I have other stuff I could do, but honestly beast tribe dailies do not interest me, and I have other games I could be grinding my face down doing completionism tasks on.

There is a certain fatigue, yes.

I'm someone that, since Dec 2016, has probably played at least a bit a day. I enjoy getting achievements and just doing content.
Since getting everything to 100 (I was fine with DT msq, not perfect but hey) and 7.1 coming out I find myself getting on barely in the morning to refresh my retainers with stuff, rushing weekly tomes and other stuff on Monday, and only occasionally working on achievements I'm close to when I don't feel like playing anything else. All my friends I play with are currently unsubbed, and I only get on to watch our large FC house and my personal some days.

There's nothing to really sink my teeth into anymore. This happened in Endwalker patches, but I was okay with it then because I had some things to catch up on. I already did some of the "big grinds" (getting the sugar glider mount, getting 20 wins on the new map dungeon) and looking for more. Chaotic kinda smacked me upside the head because it didn't solve the problem at all.
The graphics update also made things was harder for me. I have an older gaming computer that runs other games perfectly fine. Since DT it literally started to lag crazy. I can't do hunt trains without either lagging or crashing. Two of the maps immediately drop my fps low (the effects in the giants area from a Mandy attack lag me if I so much as look at them, and I don't have to explain why Heritage Found is laggy).
I love this game because of the people I've met, the character I have made and generally just existing in the game world. I hate that I feel this way.

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Originally Posted by Archeron

2. The community leaves much to be desired

This community prides itself on being "The Best gaming community", while also displaying some of the most entitled, selfish attitudes I have ever seen. This game harbors a dark underworld of stalking, and harassment (Which even persists after changes to Blacklisting). The more normal people quit the game, the more exposed you get to the two extremes you'll see on this game. One side, will bend over backwards for sprouts, and make unreasonable demands of people to accomodate the sprout, and will go out of their way to crucify anyone who makes a percieved transgression towards a new player. Lets stop pretending duty support hasn't been in the game for years... Then you have the Hardcore raiders who are incapable of putting up with even the most trivial of setbacks, and who are incapable of teaching people strategies, and just expect people to know everything, and execute every mechanic flawlessly without failure. The extreme gatekeeping and toxicity in PF's being a prime example of the worst our community has to offer.

When my friends quit playing this game, I'll quit with them - and I probably will not return until 8.0 (Assuming major steps are taken to address current issues that have persisted for several expansions at this point.)

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Besides my own personal lack of interest in gaming as I once used to, the community is the other main reason I don't play FFXIV as much as I used to.
Even when I've talked about FFXIV to others and said it's a good game I mention how the community can be.
Not everyone falls under that category ofc. But that it's something to keep in mind.

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.