What would it take for you to quit the game?

[Dzian]

I'm not entirely sure about "the formula gives money and is safe", considering that we had a pretty drastic reduction of the playerbase since HW was launched. I don't know the exact numbers but for what I remember during ARR it had nearly (if not slightly above) 1m players playing daily or something like that, but with HW its been drastically reduced to nearly half of that, if not more (or less).

Sure there's no official counter right now but considering how some servers are semi-empty and how SE had to resolve it with the Cross-Realm Party Finder (whiich wasn't even needed until now), this is a "hint" of what's the situation at the moment.
What's worse is that, they're making the expansion even less appealing by gating YET again the entire expansion with more story lock ( http://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wi...cenario_Quests it's not updated, but I can count about 400 of them). To show how annoying and uneappealing this is to a new player I actually talked to some of my friends who play all sorts of MMORPG (SWTOR; WoW, Aion, BnS) and tried to lure them into the game because of Stormblood...and guess how many were interested as soon as I mentioned "Story lock"? Zero.

So we have another expansion with more story lock, a possible rehash of the same patching formula that EVERYONE is tired with, with probably the same exact type of content we had 3-4 years ago, maybe even less content with (as you said) 1 dungeon instead of 2, and most likely no innovation to the current content that is laying dead without any make over or rework (we have so many dungeons to do, but none of them are interesting or rewarding to re-run, except for the extra tome or exp).

For the exception of the hardcore playerbase, I don't see this ending on a bright note...but hey at least someone will be happy!

The funniest thing about this is that it’s a total contradiction to everything else in the game..
They've killed so much stuff for the sake of “accessibility”. Everything they do is built around this belief that ultra accessibility is good for the game. Yet it's actually proving to be detrimental.

Content is ridiculously easy because it’s designed to be "accessible"
Normal mode raids are easy because they're designed to be "accessible".
Catch up patches exist because they’re supposed to make current content "accessible" to players. And make it "accessible" to get into raiding....
Savage raiding is easier than ever to make it "accessible" to more players.

Then they wonder why players are bored and have nothing to do or nothing to aim for. (It’s all junk next patch anyways) or they wonder why there's such a big skill gap between players because everything is so ultra accessible players don't even need to try. Thus this ultra accessibility is actually having a detrimental affect on the game rather than a positive one.

They do all of these things for "accessibilitiy" though and then do a complete u turn and block the whole lot behind a long ass story of about 450-500 easy as hell but time consuming quests plus however many will be added in storm bloods main scenario. Yeah that makes total sense. And although it’s long the story is deliberately easy to make sure it's "accessible"

"Accessibility" has destroyed a lot of this game. It's incredibly bad when content is obsolete before the servers even come up on patch day. Like expert roulette that everyone is already 30-40 I levels over powered for before the servers even go live. but hey its "accessible"

And it's made gear and progression worthless because once next patch hits everything you've done in the last patch is useless. or the next patch will have more "accessible" alternatives that are much easier to get.

I could go into 4.0 having not cleared a single ex Primal or raid in 2.0 or 3.0 and I'd be exactly the same as someone who's cleared everything in 2.0 3.0 the day it came out.

"Accessibility" is also why content gets easier which in turn deteriorates it. Rather than players trying and rising to meet the content. They wait and the content drops to the players without any effort and that takes away a lot of the satisfaction and thus players don't find the game rewarding and thus the subscriber count is as low as it is

There's no longevity to anything because of "accessibility"