What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[kpxmanifesto]

Then dispute the charge and quit? If i hated something that bad, i would've just called my CC company. You can see we still have our college-esque scions as teammates on the future story. It's not going to get miraculously better.

Fortunately the game has more to offer than just its shoddy story. If it didn't, I wouldn't have an active sub.

[kpxmanifesto]

lol looks like the forums dont like what else the game has to offer too. combat is braindead, housing is a mess forever, Pvp sucks, new alliance raid too easy. lets all just unsub now

Lol nah, everyone's different. I like everything you just mentioned minus housing.

[Lauront]

lol looks like the forums dont like what else the game has to offer too. combat is either braindead or too button bloated, housing is a mess forever, Pvp sucks and apparently needs easyanticheat, new alliance raid is now too easy. lets all just unsub now

Well for me it's more that the game does many things to a passable level (the PVP in particular is now fun but still has some wrinkles), while up to SHB it did a good job with the story, and there isn't exactly an abundance of competitors at the moment, although that landscape's changing a bit. A lot of it is concerns about where the game might end up if certain trends continue, and not so much a point of view that it's already doomed. As for people still being mad about it, 1) new people coming to the thread to offer their thoughts, and 2) new patch which retreaded some of those issues. I'm not mad about it at this stage; just disappointed. I like discussing things, so I do. If the game becomes bad enough that I derive zero enjoyment from it, I'll cancel my sub.

The whole "keening" plot point still stands out as strange to me given that we're never given any explicit confirmation about exactly what it is, just that it's dynamis-related.

Though something that bugged me even more was the sudden seeming retcon of the Blessing of Light/traveler's ward being specifically intended to protect against a primal's tempering as opposed its more generalized purpose of preventing aetherial corruption that was brought up in Shadowbringers. When that dialogue choice came up in Elpis, my first thought was "Why would I say that, the Echo is what protects against primals."

It's also a point Zenos hammers into your head. There's no real excuse for not knowing it and making an error like that. Maybe he hammered it too hard? If it did not suffice, during 5.2, Urianger disambiguates the Echo from the Blessing, and Elidibus confirms that for you.

I sometimes wonder if they were going to go with a Lavos-style villain as the big bad behind everything......then one day Ishikawa was going for a walk in a park and saw a blue bird fly by and an idea suddenly struck her: "wouldn't be a cool idea to make a cute little bird the big baddie?" and just completely derailed the original idea and that's how we got Meteion and why Meteion doesn't feel like she was originally what they had intended.

It's particularly disappointing when they had established things like this in the lore with which they could've worked (I don't mean recycling her, just working with the fact that they have this alien being summoned from who knows where, with a very intriguing text description, particularly the bit about the threads of Creation):

I was initially under the impression that this was going to be the case based on how one npc in particular describes the event.

The worst part is that the SHB description refers to it wresting control of their creation magicks first, and then came the despair, rather than the other way around, so either there is a causal aspect they've not yet revealed, or they were hoping that no one would look too closely at that.