AT THIS POINT in World of Warcraft

[rainichan]

People will likely say they have loads to do, and that's fair, I'd assume they've not been playing since ARR like myself, and have kept up with FFXIV's patches since.

Your assumption would be wrong, considering I've been playing since closed betas (not so much in 1.0, but heavily since closed beta 2 for ARR). I still have things I can and want to do, I just don't speedrun content to get it done and wonder why there's nothing else I want to do.

The only thing that would be correct to assume is not everything I want to do is things you want to do, and that's fine.

Dungeons are definitely not designed to be fun. They're designed for easy, fast, efficient roulette chores.

... If people enjoy 1500 tomes and 5 min dailies then great, I'll be off having fun.

Damn, I must be way too casual if I'm not completing every roulette for tomes within a 5min window.

Joking aside, considering XIV's current way to play is "do everything fast because my time is worth more than anything, how dare my dungeon runs take longer than 10 minutes" and speeding through dungeons has been the meta since FOREVER: how often do you see people go through the other rooms in Sastasha and not just go into the Captain's Quarters and the Waverider Gate? How often did you go an alternate path in Toto-rak when it wasn't a hallway? How often did you see the full map in a dungeon they've recently reworked in ARR? Because if your answer is "not since 2.0 in 2013," that's you answer on why dungeons are boring as all get out. The argument to get more xp is gone with the EW dungeon reworks of bosses giving all the prior XP, and no one went through those rooms or different paths anyway. There's no incentive for them to make more interesting dungeons or reasons to make other paths except now in the Variant Dungeons because everyone takes the most expedient path so they don't have to be in a dungeon "wasting [their] time." It's why no one wants to run other alliance raids except for CT because they're faster and can be completed in a very short time frame... except maybe WoD, no one knows how to run that.

Otherwise, I'm glad you're having fun, regardless of what you're playing. Generally when I come out and say "then unsub and play something else" it's out of a "if you're not having fun, why are you torturing yourself playing a game you aren't enjoying?" place. Play what's going to get those serotonin hits for you, play a game you're going to have fun with, come back later to see if things have changed for you. There's rarely fomo in XIV, the only things you may miss are seasonal events. Take a break, play other things to let your brain reset, see how you feel in a couple weeks. It's not a bad thing, I do it too, even if I've been subbed for... a very long time lmao. We don't talk about that.

[Rilifane]

Joking aside, considering XIV's current way to play is "do everything fast because my time is worth more than anything, how dare my dungeon runs take longer than 10 minutes" and speeding through dungeons has been the meta since FOREVER: how often do you see people go through the other rooms in Sastasha and not just go into the Captain's Quarters and the Waverider Gate? How often did you go an alternate path in Toto-rak when it wasn't a hallway? How often did you see the full map in a dungeon they've recently reworked in ARR? Because if your answer is "not since 2.0 in 2013," that's you answer on why dungeons are boring as all get out. The argument to get more xp is gone with the EW dungeon reworks of bosses giving all the prior XP, and no one went through those rooms or different paths anyway. There's no incentive for them to make more interesting dungeons or reasons to make other paths except now in the Variant Dungeons because everyone takes the most expedient path so they don't have to be in a dungeon "wasting [their] time." It's why no one wants to run other alliance raids except for CT because they're faster and can be completed in a very short time frame... except maybe WoD, no one knows how to run that.

The difference with dungeons there is variety on many levels which leads to a very different rhythm when running dungeons. They're easy, they're casual but they don't get stale. And although you can skip a lot, only about 1/3 of groups in leveling dungeons actually do it; most do full runs because they're fun and the skippers usually only skip a bit here and there and not 3/5 bosses with the majority of the trash. No single layer of variety is the deciding factor (e.g. varying amounts of bosses, different layouts) but all combined make for a dungeon experience that never feels repetetive.

The most variety you have in terms of rhythm in FFXIV is whether a tank pulls one or two packs at a time.
FFXIV had some of it to a degree once but they purged it and made dungeons into sterile "2-3 pack > boss, rinse & repeat" corridors that look nice but that's it. It's efficient, it's dev-approved, it's the same you will do in pretty much every single dungeon, no way around it.

My sub will run out tomorrow unless we botch our last reclear today, already been back to WoW for several weeks, having a lot of fun there with no intention of returning in the foreseeable future and I have a long list of things I look forward to doing. It has a number of issues and maybe not all of them get fixed but they're types of issues I can work with just fine. It has more than enough positives to make me shrug off the negatives.
There's no nostalgia here, there's experience from playing it, looking at it carefully and deciding "Yep, this is what I enjoy and will continue to enjoy".