Been seeing a lot of doomsaying in forums/in-game lately

[Havenchild]

People always said the same thing about WoW, look where that got them. It would be completely foolish to ignore the current state of the game, the game's direction, problems since EW launch, etc. Whether or not you think the game is "dying", pretending that it doesn't have major issues helps nobody.

Except WoW rarely catered to casual players and removed alot of said content or made it invalid. They instead chose the high end playerbase that was raiding and they listened to the raiders remarks above the rest.

The state of WoW is as is because they listened and overly bent over to the same types of players complaining on these forums now. WoWs issue is its complete and utter lack of casual content, something FFXIV has plentifully. The population of WoW has been decreasing for years while XIVs has been increasing. So it looks like the direction of XIV is just what the market wants. As others have already mentioned, these doom and gloom threads have been appearing since ARR. The direction of the game has been challenged since post ARR, its been challenged since HW, SB and SHB and despite said challenges, it continues to grow in popularity. Whether people choose to stay or not at this point is irrelevant as the game clearly is alive and well.

Now it's not to say some things can't be looked at ala PVP, which finally got a much needed revamp that received high praises all around. But there's very little focus on what the actual issue is, so devs have very few consolidated points to pull from, least looking at the NA forums.