Endwalker hates casual players

[Turtledeluxe]

FFXIV is built for casual players.

There's a pretty big audience for players that want to be optimizers, but are not into the super tough challenge mode fights that they currently have in the game and that is the group that is having problems with the game right now. The intent with the weapon from savage with that extra 5 point gear boost was supposed to be a tiny perk over what people could get otherwise just by upgrade item, but they tied the item upgrade to the progression system needed to get the weapon that is five points over that, and locked everyone else out of getting the upgraded tomestone weapon until a later point as it is supposed to be a reward for those who are doing the harder content.

Optimizers aren't trying to get better gear for the sake of clearing harder content, they are doing it because they want to clear existing content faster and compete with others in the community on numeric factors. Things like how fast someone can clear a dungeon and the like are the kind of challenges they are after rather than being able to clear ultimate or kill the final tier special boss.

FFXIV, like all MMOs late stage, caters to raiders hand over fist. That's why once MSQ is done, casual and midcore players are told to go play other games.

Raiders decide everything. Job design, the meta, fight design. Nearly all moment to moment gameplay you experience is driven by minmaxing raiders whose entire life is playing this game with plug-ins.

I'd also argue the only reason EW spiced up casual content a bit is because the devs were course correcting from how braindead they made the game in the effort to appease raiders about jobs and gear.

There's a hot take you can all quote and cry about.