the normal content is too easy

[Striker44]

This game actually isn't that popular though. Sure, it's grown a bit within its lane over the years, but people in the community seem to overestimate how big this games reach actually is.

This game has never even managed to achieve 1/5th of what was WoWs peak subscriber count. There are games out there that pull in more users in a single day than this game manages to pull in over a span of 3 months.

Retention on this game is always surprisingly low when a major influx of players is brought in by an external source. Their content model actually alienates a lot of potential players, with lack of difficulty, MSQ gating and slow combat pacing being extremely common complaints. In my personal experience, of all of the friends I've introduced this game to, only 1 actually made it out of ARR.

It is actually very popular right now, all things considered. This isn't the age of the MMO anymore like it was in the early 2000's. WoW achieved its amazing feat by creating a casual-friendly game at the perfect time the genre itself was peaking. Speaking frankly, you could design the literal perfect MMO right now and you still wouldn't come close to reaching WoW's peak, simply because you have an entire younger generation of gamers who have moved away from long-term MMO's and to the immediate gratification of the Mobile, MOBA, and FTP genres. In this day and age, an FTP w/ microtransactions on a mobile device is always going to get more players than a subscription-based MMO. That's just reality.

Given that environment, EW has been an enormous success. It blew away all previous xpacs, and even the late-patch troughs (which happen in *every* game in this genre) are still miles above the number of players during similar late-patch troughs in previous expansions. Take a trip around YT or even Reddit (of all places) and you'll see a massive amount of praise for EW.

[vetch]

It is actually very popular right now, all things considered. This isn't the age of the MMO anymore like it was in the early 2000's. WoW achieved its amazing feat by creating a casual-friendly game at the perfect time the genre itself was peaking. Speaking frankly, you could design the literal perfect MMO right now and you still wouldn't come close to reaching WoW's peak, simply because you have an entire younger generation of gamers who have moved away from long-term MMO's and to the immediate gratification of the Mobile, MOBA, and FTP genres. In this day and age, an FTP w/ microtransactions on a mobile device is always going to get more players than a subscription-based MMO. That's just reality.

Given that environment, EW has been an enormous success. It blew away all previous xpacs, and even the late-patch troughs (which happen in *every* game in this genre) are still miles above the number of players during similar late-patch troughs in previous expansions. Take a trip around YT or even Reddit (of all places) and you'll see a massive amount of praise for EW.

The FF14 subreddit has been tongue-bathing the game since at least the time I started playing in Shadowbringers 5.2.

[Ivtrix]

The FF14 subreddit has been tongue-bathing the game since at least the time I started playing in Shadowbringers 5.2.

mainsub likes to think its so high and mighty but its quite literally as bad as these forums lol

[Carin-Eri]

It is actually very popular right now, all things considered. This isn't the age of the MMO anymore like it was in the early 2000's. WoW achieved its amazing feat by creating a casual-friendly game at the perfect time the genre itself was peaking. Speaking frankly, you could design the literal perfect MMO right now and you still wouldn't come close to reaching WoW's peak, simply because you have an entire younger generation of gamers who have moved away from long-term MMO's and to the immediate gratification of the Mobile, MOBA, and FTP genres. In this day and age, an FTP w/ microtransactions on a mobile device is always going to get more players than a subscription-based MMO. That's just reality.

Given that environment, EW has been an enormous success. It blew away all previous xpacs, and even the late-patch troughs (which happen in *every* game in this genre) are still miles above the number of players during similar late-patch troughs in previous expansions. Take a trip around YT or even Reddit (of all places) and you'll see a massive amount of praise for EW.

This.

From a previous game (MMO) I played, I'd say that F2P games now 'enjoy' a generation of gamers who want to be able to buy their way through the game to the point where, in the actual game content, you can literally fall asleep/afk and still receive a completion reward when the timer runs out because the beancounters don't care about making quality, playable, content anymore - they care about producing loot boxes and pay-to-win cash-shop bait to entice players to get their credit cards out.