Quote Originally Posted by Mithron View Post
snip for length
It sounds like it may be time for a change of venue. There's a ton of opinion in here trying to masquerade as fact (and other thoughts that are just plain false), and in the end that will likely only serve to frustrate you more. The game being "good" before or "bad" now is your own opinion. Nothing more, nothing less. Other people will have the complete opposite opinion. If by "peak" or "plummet" you're referring to player population, that would be objectively incorrect. The playerbase has continued growing with each successive expansion, and even the late-patch "troughs" in EW have more players than the "peaks" of at least ARR and HW, maybe further. Heck, the infamous Steam data shows that the player population is higher in EW than in ShB at each corresponding point in the patch sequence.

I feel like there's two forces working against you. One is the reality that things naturally change over time. MMO's are no exception. It's not 2010 anymore. The core MMO demographic is no longer teenagers, college kids, and young adults with a lot of time on their hands...now it's people in their 30's and 40's with families and full-time careers. Developers have to adjust to that. Wildstar was a huge lesson, and even that was almost 10 years ago.

The other is the natural human tendency to both grow and get bored. Grow in the sense that we're no longer new to MMO's (or FFXIV in particular). There's a human nostalgia for when the genre and the game were new to us. So much to explore. So much to discover. Now, we're veterans. We got good. We've seen the sights. They can keep adding mechanics to fights, but it's still going to feel "easy" simply because we know what we're doing now.

There's also the reality that we get bored with doing the same thing over time. I've pointed out elsewhere that the typical person will hold 10-12 different jobs during their life, changing about every 4 years. And that includes many people in fields they have a passion for - they still end up desiring a change after being in the same environment for a while. The same is true for video games. A developer could make the best game ever created in human existence, and we will still get tired of it and want something else, because that's human nature.

Patch 3.4 came out in the second half of 2016. You've been playing this game for over 7 years. You may have just reached the point where what you really need is just something different, either for a while or for good. Personally, when I see someone use the word "sickening" to describe a decision about a class in a video game, I think there's an unhealthy level of "investment" there and I get a little concerned. Take a breath. Try other things. Find something you enjoy.