Zepla: Endwalker is the Worst FFXIV Expansion I have played

[Jojoya]

FFXIV's peak monthly active player counts are somewhere in the region of 20 million.

Where did this number come from? Because dang that's a lot of bots.

Toning back on the sarcasm a bit:

As generally happy as I am about the state of the game, even I can't take 20 million unique active players a month for FFXIV as credible. The number of log-ins per month (which could include multiple per player)? Sure, 20 million sounds about right. Maybe 2 million unique players a month? Definitely possible if free trial accounts are being included.

I'm just going to go ahead and quote a previous post of mine to address the 'take a break' and 'stop spending money on the game' declarations and explain why they often don't go down well:

Certainly people have a variety of reasons for maintaining a subscriptions for a game even when unhappy. Their choice what they do with their money.

But it comes with risk, like companies not thinking twice about releasing half-finished, sloppy games and content updates.

Disagreements about the quality of the current expansion aside, I don't want players to send signals to the gaming industry that players are happy to pay for content they don't like and have no interest in playing. That's how players get stuck with trash games and trash releases - too many throw money at anything. If they want developers to be making games they want to be playing, they need to be putting their money into the games that have content they're enjoying and not the games they don't want to be playing.

I know a few of those who are negative and vocal do have some content they enjoy - great, keep playing. They're getting something they like for your money even if it could be better. But once someone is on the "there's nothing to do" path or "there's only 2 hours of content per patch rant", they're not getting anything of value for their money. Are they happy paying to support content development for other players with minimal chance of getting any content they might like in turn?

I kept pushing money at Blizzard for about 28 months out of a 52 month period thinking maybe they would wake up, maybe they would change things In WoW. I finally realized nothing was getting better. They had their own vision for what they wanted WoW to be, they didn't care about what the player base felt. I finally got smart and quit once and for all.

$15/mo doesn't seem like a lot of money. It looks a lot different when you realize that wasn't $15 I wasted. It was over $400. It adds up over time as you keep waiting for things to change and they don't.