Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
Also on the point of “even if every forum user was aligned with the EW bad narrative it’s still a tiny minority” that implies everyone not on the forums is content with the state of the game, this comes back to Val’s common attitude, the “my opinion is the default unless proven otherwise” which you are using here, the “if I don’t see someone actively disagreeing with me I’m gonna assume by default they agree with me”, just as you like to point out we don’t know if we are the majority you have no idea if you are the majority either, but we do know is that the vast majority of the streamers agree with us and that speaks a lot considering their cumulative knowledge and pull in the community
Honestly. I'd say the only assumption that can be made is that for the majority of the paying players the pros at least outweigh the cons resulting in them sticking with the game and continuing to pay the monthly subscription. Sure you have the outliers like certain people on the forum that pay their sub and make alts constantly just to spam all over this forum how much they hate the game, why x other game is better, why this game is doomed, etc. There's also those that might have stopped playing and forgotten they have a monthly sub. And also those that are only sticking around to socialize with the friends they made in game.

However, IMO Dawntrail I feel is going to be the next real make or break point for this game. The reason I feel this way is because while the expansions we had up till now progressed a long ongoing storyline, that primary story reached a conclusion in Endwalker. This essentially means that the story for Dawntrail will either be a one off thing limited to that expansion cycle or the start of a new saga. As such it doesn't have that extra pull previous expansions had where people were invested in the story and wanted to see the next chapter of it similar to manga, novels, movies, etc... It's going to have to do more to stand on its own. If they double down and continue pushing the things that have been creating most of the negative feedback, I don't think visual overhauls and a few QoL improvements are going to be enough to keep it afloat.