Zepla about FFXIV Relic and Square Enix not taking any Risks

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not quite sure what you mean? When Zepla announced that she was taking a break from FF14, she made a video explaining why she was burned out, and she cited 2 reasons:

She explained that her burnout was as a content creator, that she was was burned out from trying to create content on FF14 all day everyday after doing that for 7 years. That's a very unique problem to have that doesn't have anything to do with how normal players play the game.

She also mentions that something that contributed to her burnout was that she put together a poorly-vetted group for the Omega Ultimate, and she spent 8-hours a day in this negative, mismanaged group that made her miserable and contributed to her burnout. I would find it hard to see this as anything besides a subjective personal situation.

In fact, in her burnout video Zepla explicitly states that FF14 isn't designed to be played at the magnitude that she was playing it at; that it's designed to just have a trickle of content that doesn't pressure you to play a lot, and that you can just come back to play when you want to. Which she most definitely did not do. And she burned out. And I greatly respect that she was able to acknowledge that, and that she was able to own her burnout and proactively step away to address it.

Okay. Let's put it this way:

She's a content creator who's established herself around FFXIV. To make money, she will primarily be playing XIV (or reacting to other content creators' [reacting to other content creators' [etc.] XIV-related, -comparative, or -adjacent content), and her doing so has to be at least decently entertaining to her viewers. To avoid burnout, it must also be decently entertaining to herself without overwhelming stress as she perceives it. Good so far?

Now... if the only thing you can create some sort of many-hour-spanning stream narrative out of after MSQ is (briefly Savage, and then) Ultimate, then the chance of entertaining both self and audience without overwhelming stress... is limited to solely the most stressful content in the game (exempting minority reactions to say, seemingly unfair Triple Triad NPC fights).

Now, compare that to what would be relevant to her even as a full-time streamer / content creator... if there were more midcore content. See how those aren't likely to be all that separate of issues?

But at the same time, such would benefit the rest of us, too. What would help address her complaints wouldn't be an undue expense to the rest of us; it would probably be a boon.

As such, I don't see why her complaints about having less to do surrounding, say, Relic progression should be ignored just because she burned out or just because she's a XIV streamer. That seems a misread of the larger picture there, equivalent to mistaking a problem felt in (potentially reluctant) option A with being somehow unrelated to any issue in lacking any real options other than A.