Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
If you consider both the NA and JP demographics, raiding is likely far more popular than you're giving it credit. We saw greater burnout this year due to how challenging Gordias turned out to be. Midas has been better received overall, as have all extreme primals in Heavensward. Granted, the primal fights have never been all that criticised. Nevertheless, they have tried new content; Lord of Verminion, Diadem and etc. No one does them. Now I'm not saying either is necessarily good, but forum goers don't tend to make up even a quarter of the general audience. The state of raid isn't bad in FFXIV, but there is a noticeable gap between skill levels, which makes the lack of a larger midcore segment all the more apparent. That said, JP players do not have near the difficulty NA do. So I doubt you'll see changes to the formula now.
The two examples that you used are a bit curious. Only one of them was really a well tried attempt.

Lord of Verminion is really not an answer for horizontal progression. At best, it's a side game in a main game. At worse, it's nearly pointless and a waste of time. That was not what the regular playerbase was asking for at all and I think this was stemmed from an April Fools joke that a certain minor vocal group said "That would be so cool!" and took it for gospel.

Diadem's major problem was that it became a complete grindfest against mobs the whole time after you were done the quests. They completely butchered the entire zone by doing it as a glorified FATE, which people were more than vocal about FATEs being pure shyte. That's again a case of them not listening to the playerbase asking for meaningful content. Grinding my face against dinosaurs for 70 minutes is absolutely stupid.

They had something with the Diadem. They completely mucked it up. It was supposed to be about exploration; heck, it has all the makings to be interesting like that!

It turned out to be ridiculous. Pointless. And incredibly gimmicky because the gear dropped could have been BiS depending on how the rolls were made on the item. It was such a mess that I still shake my head thinking about that place.

And I would be very curious to see the stats pointing out the percentile of raiding in both JPN and NA. I will still wager, that if you put both playerbases together, that it's STILL around 5%.