Review of 6.3 Story Content

[Renathras]

Again I am not saying their opinions aren't valid, I am just pointing out that you are going to have a certain over saturated viewpoint on his videos, just like you might see a different over saturated viewpoint from a youtuber who has a more critical reception to things in the game. I agree 100% that the OP way overstates problems with the game and plays fast and loose with what are factual or not, but if you look past that you can see some valid thoughts and opinions that shouldn't be shut down because he goes to the extreme.

That's fair - IF we recognize the same thing in reverse. These forums are known to have an oversaturated critical poster base. And Reddit isn't much better. So by this token, we could point out that you have a certain over saturated viewpoint on these forums and on Reddit. Right?

Valid thoughts can and should be stated as such. His few half-valid points were drowned out by the rest of the gunk, which makes it hard to have a reasonable discussion. The false appeal to authority doesn't help. Though we CAN have a reasonable discussion over the reasonable points...but that would require the OP to engage with people critiquing his points and acknowledge and/or offer counters to their points, which he didn't do. Perhaps other people in the thread are doing it, but the OP kind of poisoned the waters from the start making it more difficult.

EDIT:

Regardless, we need those Devs back or this game is going to start to go in the wrong direction fast, public opinion and perception are terribly fluid. Once people think that the game is in decline, it will take 10 times more work to counter that perception or direction, even if they are incorrect. Opinions and perceptions are incredibly powerful in either direction with mountains of work to go up and a drop of a feather to fall... and the feather is quivering...

While this CAN be true, it's probably not QUITE as true as you think.

Keep in mind FFXIV had stable sub numbers pre-6.0, and even pre-5.0. Yoshi P once said something to the general effect he was fine being a lower playerbase MMO (as long as it was profitable enough to keep the servers running, I guess), and had no ambitions to be the most played in the world or the WoW killer or whatnot. He seemed genuinely shocked with the 5.4/5.5 surge in players and then dismayed with 6.0 and the servers not being able to handle FFXIV being a victim of its own success. Not only did SE pause sales of the game, Yoshi P made a public apology to the players (and even non-player gamers that were trying to join in) over it and all the stuff they were trying to do to fix things. Nothing says "You've done an amazing job" like basically being sold out of every copy of the thing you're selling (or in this case, having servers so full people were waiting in ques for hours and thousands of players just to get in on it)

When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started playing MMOs (and games in general) to have a social outlet and something to do when stuck at home, it also happened to be at a time when WoW had one of their weakest expansions in history and a massive company scandal (or...like three of them or so), also at a time FFXIV expanded their free trial (critically acclaimed, etc etc), and we had a content drought in basically all MMOs at more or less the same time, where a bunch of YouTubers and content creators tried out FFXIV, leading to a glut of players just as EW launched, which is WHY (that and the pandemic breaking down supply lines) the servers had so many issues and they couldn't get new ones up to share the load, leading to a perfect storm.

The end result was FFXIV's playerbase basically doubled from somewhere in the 1.5-2.5 million to somewhere in the 3-5 million range. Possibly more.

Those people, keep in mind, the 1.5-2.5 million, were both enough to keep the game going and paying for itself (and a good chunk of SE's profits) AND were the people sticking with the game through Stormblood, arguably FFXIV's weakest expansion (it set a lot of things up, but was slow in a lot of places and seemed to suffer from the overly split focus). That is, this was the stable playerbase pre-5.0, pre-5.4/5.5 (the initial glut), and pre-6.0 (the massive hyper surge). That's FFXIV's "floor", so to speak.

So even if everything happened as you said and the fair-weather-players all quit...FFXIV would basically be back to where it was in 4.5-5.1 or so, which was a healthy place. So the (realizable) worst case scenario here isn't really end of the world terrible.

That said, it'd be nice to keep capturing lightning in a bottle again and again with FFXIV, and it's done so a number of times, so easily can again. But I think the doom and gloom is insanely premature. One can argue better to get ahead of things now before they get too terrible, but we really aren't on a "terrible" trend right now, either.