Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
The patch is not intended to last month four months. There's a widely referenced Yoshi-P Q&A where a player asked how he was expected to keep his motivation up between content droughts. Yoshi-P's reponse was to play another game for a couple of months and then come back to FFXIV for the next content drop. SE isn't Blizzard.
I'm impressed how much people cling to this one line and parrot it over and over.

There is a big difference between dropping your sub entirely and leaving for several months, and just keeping it running while you spread your time out over multiple games. No developer wants the first one, that's financial suicide. If the entire playerbase played a patch for 1 month and quit entirely for the other 3, the game would die.

All Yoshida meant is that unlike WoW they don't employ infinite treadmill grinds where you'll fall behind on progression if you don't play constantly. So if you want to do other things in your spare time, you won't sacrifice progress and always be behind. It doesn't mean they don't care about player retention. It's not an excuse to provide less content. It doesn't mean content shouldn't have long term and replay value.