Maybe we need a Cataclysm

[Mansion]

Then you can't just wait for the next MMO? Instead of screwing over people who are fine with the current status quo?

That's my position actually. I've been getting more and more bored/frustrated with FFXIV since the end of Stormblood and it only got worse with Shadowbringers' cycle of patch content (nothing related to COVID delays).
I'm here for the MSQ and raiding, and I don't find much to do in between. But I don't think FFXIV should change all over just to grab my attention, I'd rather play a brand new MMO in the end, with FFXIV continuing its own path. We are nearing the end but potentially we could still have great MSQ content beyond 5.X.

I'm not a big WoW nerd, but I've read / heard a lot that Cataclysm was the first step that made players so divided about current WoW.

[Penthea]

I'm not a big WoW nerd, but I've read / heard a lot that Cataclysm was the first step that made players so divided about current WoW.

It's true. Cataclysm marked the start of WoW's fall from their throne of the undisputed king of the mmorpg genre. WoW is still by far the most popular game in its genre, but people in general don't have as high an opinion as they did before.

The calamity for 1.0 made sense because that game was simply awful. It needed to be scrapped in order to be saved. The difference with WoW is that the Wrath of The Lich King expansion was considered an incredibly high point for the game, but Blizzard did a cataclysm anyway.

It made sense for the story but it ended up changing a lot of the zones players loved, and it completely obliterated some content. This alone wasn't very well received by a considerable amount of players, and on top of that Blizzard suddenly made the group content far more difficult to do which was a nasty shock for a lot of the playerbase. Cataclysm literally made me stop pugging all content for several months. I was constantly running into groups who were trying to play the game as if it was still the previous expansion and as a healer this gave me a tremendous amount of headaches.

Cataclysm brought on some unnecessary changes and some of the necessary ones were too heavy-handed from the beginning. I certainly agreed that the group content needed to be more difficult but this change should have been a gradual process instead of suddenly putting up a wall in front of players. That was the biggest mistake. It was too much change too suddenly and Blizzard lost a lot of subs because of it.

Also Cataclysm messed up the chronological order of the story. New players would start in Cataclysm, and then at lvl 60 they would literally go back in time to play The Burning Crusade and The Wrath of The Lich King content, and then at lvl 80 they would be back in Cataclysm again. I met many players who were so confused by this.

Cataclysm was a really cool idea done quite badly.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not a big WoW nerd, but I've read / heard a lot that Cataclysm was the first step that made players so divided about current WoW.

Very, very little of that was due to the changes to the original world, though. Almost every one of those changes were a significant net improvement. Many of the zones' changes made for a far more lively and engaging world, even if it still had plenty of room for further improvement.