If you've 'run out of stuff to do' in a game as big as 14, the answer isn't 'more 14'

[TaleraRistain]

Not quite. If Yoshida announced tomorrow they could completely overhaul the graphics to make the game look like Black Desert or that we could have a much more robust character creator but it would cost us a patch of content, you'd probably see much less of a vitriolic response. Endwalker spent a significant amount of time overhauling content the vast majority of us will never engage with. Which meant we possibly lost content without any direct benefit. And I say possibly because we don't actually know whether the whole Trust system and dungeon overhaul truly impacted EW's development. After all, would Island Sanctuary suddenly not be a sweatshop simulator if those aforementioned overhauls didn't happen?

Not to mention, QoL features shouldn't impact content longevity. It isn't exactly hard to toss in some meaningful rewards so Criterion isn't dead on arrival.

Do we have to engage with something to benefit from it? Look at Duty Support. That will attract new players to our game and new players are needed with any MMO. And the streamlining of tells means that we'll get new players who understand what the red tankbuster marker means, or how to handle stack markers. Which will make our time in roulette with them smoother and more productive. I don't really care too much about how pretty my game is so I'm not going to benefit directly much from the graphical upgrade. I'm actually on the opposite end because I need to upgrade my PC now. But that may bring in more players who care about that sort of thing, or retain players who really wanted to see something new there. We don't always have to engage directly with something for it to be beneficial toward the future of the game.

I agree they could have put more rewards for Criterion, but even that would eventually die once people had what they wanted. I've seen people mention here even some less-popular 8 man raid series or alliance raid series are hard to get through. The only real thing SE has managed to keep constantly populated is roulettes and that's because they always have an everchanging tomestone reward tied to them. I don't think they'll ever solve the issue of some content dying out after the initial rush of players getting their rewards from it. The best they can do is try to future-proof that content so it's still accessible when things have died down.