World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[Alaray]

I don't think the reasons you've pinpointed in the OP are the reasons why WoW hit a rut, it sort of ignores various other problems and extenuating circumstances that fed into why there was a massive downturn. Guess, though, it could play a part with the extreme ends of LFR (and apparently the new normal raid is particularly difficult for that tier or something? I don't know the details).

Though, I will say that I do agree with it otherwise. Content is, ultimately, designed to be beaten and overcome and even the easier content should -- at least -- feel rewarding, fun and fulfilling to succeed in. I don't think content needs to be difficult/for the bleeding edge since, generally speaking, it puts most people off ever trying that content (especially when people tend to overhype difficulty tiers to boost their own egos) and then the pool of people doing said content continually shrinks. In the same vein, I don't think content you can afk in and win in is, necessarily, a good design path. Some of the bosses, in XIV in particular, that people talk about the most aside from early Alexander floors; tend to be bosses that aren't particularly complex in their execution, but feel good to execute and feel good to perform on and feel fun to fight (ie: God Kefka, Titan Savage, can even throw in Titan Extreme, Halicarnassus, Neo-Exdeath -- personal ones /I/ liked I consider on the easier Savage spectrum would be Guardian, Hippokampos, Chaos, O11S, Cloud of Darkness).

I do think difficulty can be fun, but I also think "fun" and "difficult" are not synonymous terms. Ultimate, as it stands, is a lot more accessible (in terms of difficulty) than I feel people give it credit for (a lot of it tends to be in time committed to an Ultimate group), but I do think it's a tier of difficulty that's often over-valued by people. If you can beat savage, imo, you can beat an ultimate fight (the extremes of "blind prog" and "world prog" not included, since I feel for blind you'd either need the patience of a literal God, or be a lot more well-versed in the styles of mechanics + their presentations in the game: ie: more experience than 1 savage tier).

And, I think, a lot of people who say they want more difficulty (*harder than the Ultimate experience canprovide) are generally people who don't do those pieces of content (but say they do), or are people who do those pieces of content and want to look like they're the best player in the room when no one knows who they are. (Not to say I don't think there's a very small minority of people who do, genuinely, want content at such an extreme level of difficulty because /that/ is what they find fun -- but that is, realistically, not the majority of players nor the majority of players who often crow about the topic and, to a degree, it's an unrealistic expectation).

I kind of feel, for a lot of people on the topic of difficulty, it's a pride thing. "Which game is harder? WoW? XIV? Lost Ark?" and then you get the sea of emotional knee jerk reactions because, whichever one someone claims to be hardest, the other two are being called "easy" which hurts a lot of gamer egos. Even the same in the XIV community, purely internally -- "___ Job is easy" will get people riled up a lot of the time. Or people who over-analyze or over-care about how someone else clears an Ultimate (Dyrus, Rich for examples).

I do think, generally, closer to the two edges of middle-of-the-road (which, is largely what I consider midcore since everyone kind of has a different definition), is healthier. Savage being fun to play, rewarding to win, and a good time to re-play (reclears/Party Finder) is a good thing (and, for this tier, I enjoyed PFing 1/2/4 -- I stopped reclearing mostly because of P3S reclears. I love that fight, but it utterly annihilates Party Finder and the hassle of dealing with the set up, the constant impatient people who're wiping the party anyway, etc... and sitting for /hours/ in a P4S party is... yeah I started playing Lost Ark and Elden Ring instead LOL).

[Teno]

People are not (all) asking for content harder than ultimate, but instead other forms of difficulty, and there are multiple things they have experimented with : duels in Bozja, DRS, deep dungeons solo, pvp to some extent. Above all it's about having options, and people have been requesting a repeatable small scale hard content for a while (mythic+ form but different ?).

[Kacho_Nacho]

But aren’t healer in final fantasy 14 even worse gameplay wise as the ones in wow ?. If you talk about changes that did kill healer then we should not forget final fantasy 14 healer design choices and as with wow they also ignore these voices and the same with a lot of other jobs. Like I give you the example lifeletter we’re healer player did ask if they could fights more heal challenging and the answer was “You can go play ultimate fights if you are bored”, like if they actually had a clue about healers then they know these fights we’re also done by a solo healer.

Wow greatest problem is that it doesn’t respect the time the player has and that they have no fluffing clue how too write good storylines.

Honestly, I feel WoW's Cataclysm healers had it worse than FFXIV's Endwalker healers. WoW's "brilliant" idea was to weaken healing spells and make the whole party responsible for the party's survival. Healers couldn't dps at all. They had to save their mana for healing.

Needless to say, this went over like a lead balloon. Instead of changing how they played, individuals would kick any healer who couldn't keep them alive. Within a month, every healer on my friends list had either left the game or had switched another role.

Meanwhile, FFXIV has the opposite idea. Healers hardly have to heal and much of our time is spent spamming one damage spell. It's boring and I agree, it is clear Square Enix doesn't understand why many players are unhappy with the current state of healers.

Furthermore, S.E. is either not listening to players or is seriously misunderstanding our input. You just have to look at dark knights and monks, two jobs which were fun when they were introduced but are now red hot messes to play.

[sharknado]

It's boring and I agree, it is clear Square Enix doesn't understand why many players are unhappy with the current state of healers.

You don't need your job stone, job quests, you can enter most instances with quite old gear and the gameplay may not depend on parses/combat analyzers so in case of 1/1/2 tank nor healer can have any heavy responsibility Trinity design needs a trinity but to be super friendly to any skill level they just made it "simple". And they now want FF franchise players that do not play FF14 due to it online nature to come in and play solo, with Trust and so on. Theoretically it's a much wider audience than for anything competitive.

[Ixon]

Furthermore, S.E. is either not listening to players or is seriously misunderstanding our input. You just have to look at dark knights and monks, two jobs which were fun when they were introduced but are now red hot messes to play.

As a HW DRK fan, I believe the explanation for those changes were due the devs specifically wanting to have the gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling as small as possible and also lowering the skill floor required to play those jobs even remotely well. People complain how hard you have to carry a bad DRK now, when it was WAY worse in HW due to the attention required to maintain your MP that was the key to both offensive and defensive abilities that also controlled your tank stance swapping(which cost MP for those who don't know). While many people, myself included, enjoyed the mechanics of it all, it's skill floor was buffed(or nerfed depending how you see it), so more casual players could adopt it and not be a complete disaster of a party member. Same thing applied to MNK.

Now if the devs main goal was to shrink the gap between skill floor and ceiling as much as possible, I believe they have achieved it in EW, but if I was speaking honestly I wish they would increase the ceiling by a tiny bit just so more hardcore and veteran players have more to do and more to optimize at a high end level gameplay.

[Kacho_Nacho]

You don't need your job stone, job quests, you can enter most instances with quite old gear and the gameplay may not depend on parses/combat analyzers so in case of 1/1/2 tank nor healer can have any heavy responsibility Trinity design needs a trinity but to be super friendly to any skill level they just made it "simple". And they now want FF franchise players that do not play FF14 due to it online nature to come in and play solo, with Trust and so on. Theoretically it's a much wider audience than for anything competitive.

Good point. But, I can't help but feel that in their quest to bring in that wider audience, SE is losing players who want more in their job's gameplay. There's got to be a middle road.

As a HW DRK fan, I believe the explanation for those changes were due the devs specifically wanting to have the gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling as small as possible and also lowering the skill floor required to play those jobs even remotely well. People complain how hard you have to carry a bad DRK now, when it was WAY worse in HW due to the attention required to maintain your MP that was the key to both offensive and defensive abilities that also controlled your tank stance swapping(which cost MP for those who don't know). While many people, myself included, enjoyed the mechanics of it all, it's skill floor was buffed(or nerfed depending how you see it), so more casual players could adopt it and not be a complete disaster of a party member. Same thing applied to MNK.

Now if the devs main goal was to shrink the gap between skill floor and ceiling as much as possible, I believe they have achieved it in EW, but if I was speaking honestly I wish they would increase the ceiling by a tiny bit just so more hardcore and veteran players have more to do and more to optimize at a high end level gameplay.

*emphasis mine*

Exactly. I am by no means a hardcore player but I do wish my favorite job hadn't been simplified into a glare mage. I want to feel rewarded for good play.

[Kolsykol]

Furthermore, S.E. is either not listening to players or is seriously misunderstanding our input. You just have to look at dark knights and monks, two jobs which were fun when they were introduced but are now red hot messes to play.

Imo MNK isn't a mess if we disregard the Dragon Kick spam rotation ( which should be nerfed imo, it's just stupid ).
I think overall it's rly good.

Reason why I quit playing it tho after having played MNK since ARR is because quite frankly outside of the new Master Gauge which was a good addition it just feels so insanely outdated.
The animations are so underwhelming and weak compared to others and don't really sell what MNK's are supposed to be they're too slow and unimpressive.
I was hoping for new combos updated to be more like Tifa in FF7R or something, I just couldn't deal with it anymore and it's the same loop as we've done since ARR.
Master Gauge just wasn't enough for me but I've also played it for so long that I probably have a different perspective.

[IdowhatIwant]

Once again, I think people focus on WoW failing because of toxic players, an emphasis on hardcore raiding, and a bad story.

WoW is as toxic as FF just in a different way.

WoW did emphasize on raiding, but they did not only focus on hardcore raiding. Only about 1-2% of players even participated in the games hardest content, there are more FFXIV players that participate in FFXIV's hardest content.

Most WoW players did not know the story or did not care, but it was the icing on the cake that helped lead to it's failure.

The reason WoW failed, started in Cataclysm with a lack of content, expansions that felt incomplete, and a high skill cap. The devs also over simplified most classes after Cataclyms due to complaints that the content was to hard similar to what happened in FFXIV in Stormblood on. Warlords of Dreanor they introduced world completion to be able to fly essentially gating it behind more hours of game play vs simply buying it as in previous expansions. Legion they made a endless grind for artifact power to try and appeal to casual players that want to get on do a couple quests and get off. With each expansion less was added to the game as a whole to add various casual content which never served it's purpose, was implemented poorly, or was simply not fun. Examples of these are the island expeditions and war fronts in BFA and Torghast in Shadow Lands. These are the things that have caused WoW to fail, because with each expansion the game got much worse and the changes were not redacted and more content was not added only content was lost.

A large majority of WoW players will say that Vanilla through Wraith of the Lich King was WoW's prime. The reasons for this was Vanilla WoW was essentially the first MMO of it's kind with a much more simplified gameplay and less punishing mechanics when compared to older MMO's like Everquest and FFXI. Burning Crusade expanded the classes, began really balancing the various specs allowing many more specs to be viable, and expanding the crafting system to the best state in WoWs existence. Wraith of the Lich King introduced a slew of catch up mechanics, made most specs viable, and began to start introducing a plot to the WoW expansions which was not seen to this level in the previous expansions.

That being said, FFXIV is going through a similar process which will lead to its failure. FFXIV has always worked fairly well with all classes being viable for raids, even in ARR. Some were typically sought after more like bards, and ninja's due to there TP regen and party DPS buffs. HW was where all classes were very well viable, and in different fights certain classes provided more utility than others. For example a monk or dark knight providing an int down debuff which would help players survive magic damage based bosses. After HW, the classes got over simplified due to the raid scene getting close to dying due to Alexanders difficulty. Stormblood broke the plot into multiple ares which felt incomplete, and also began removing content in place of other content. Shadowbringers FFXIV stepped up with the plot, but the classes became even more simplified and the content even less. Now we are at Endwalker, were some classes press only a couple buttons for there rotation, we are told we are getting even less content in place of other new content, and the game is trying to appeal to another demographic of single player RPG game fans. If you really pay attention this is a similar cycle WoW has gone through, class simplification, content being cut for "other content", and trying to appeal the game to a wider audience by adding unnecessary systems to appeal to this audience while other aspects of the game began to falter. I will be eager to see what is done in 7.0 but I have low expectations, and assume it will likely be my last expansion if things do not change.

[Equitable_Remedy]

Just came back to remind people that WoW isn't dead.

FF14 isn't dead either.

[Kolsykol]

Shadowlands was the fastest selling PC game of all time.

It's worth noting that people are sheep and very easily swooned by marketing.
People see a CG trailer with action and they're instantly sold it's honestly a bit embarrassing how easily people buy into things even after having been screwed over multiple times and probably on some level knowing it's going to be bad.
I mean so many of the big AAA publishers entire existence is like that it doesn't matter how bad a game is and who it's from if there's a lot of money behind the marketing then it doesn't matter.

It's like that CoD meme where people ranted about all the bad changes and how horrible it was and how they're never buying another CoD game again, then at launch they were all playing it on Steam.
I don't really have this problem if anything it's very easy to lose me as a customer it doesn't actually take much I have pretty high standards for which studios I support which is why I don't rly support a lot of them and have basically written off AAA games almost altogether.
Sure the Diablo 4 trailer was cool to look at and I grew up playing Diablo 1 and 2 and actually rly loved Diablo 3, but I am not excited at all for it because it's not just about the game and watching a fancy CG trailer ≠ playing the game.
I've just written Blizz off entirely regardless of how much I love their franchises and it's not going to change without some pretty enormous changes that just aren't going to happen realistically.

Not to toot my own horn here but if people had the self-control I have with this and weren't so ultra consoom maybe changes would actually happen but they're not and companies know this.
The narrative around WoW is going to do a complete 180 when the next CG trailer drops for the next expansion.