Quote Originally Posted by Mlem View Post
Because nobody has shown up here saying that. Nobody in the git gud crowd has talked about personally being frustrated to the point of Endwalker being unplayable. I also took a glance at threads current around Endwalker's launch (not a full read, but it's like 20 pages in?) and there was no exodus of players off the back of the quality of dungeon gameplay at the time. No wave of hardcore casuals throwing up their hands and quitting. Indeed, dungeons seemed relatively unremarked at the time compared to how divisive they've been in DT.

By contrast, for DT, I have seen people saying they're done either because of the quality of the story, scenes and voice acting and pointing out how well Genshin fills that niche, or because of accessibility issues in MSQ and combat content with GW2 being pointed as an alternative. I don't always understand why these people have those problems, but I do believe them when they say they have them.

In other words, I think that, frankly, if the MSQ dungeons were nerfed to EW levels, all the hardcore casuals will grumble and moan and still stay subbed whereas if no course change is applied, at least some people will leave and the community will be worse off for it. So the business case I think is really clear; having an accessible game with a reasonable amount of rewarding casual combat content makes FFXIV bigger and more profitable.


And again, I think having a Story Mode checkbox that trivializes a Duty Support pass of the problematic dungeons with a giant buff would be an extremely low cost way of at least providing accessibility.
Oh we got a business expert in the house. You know amount of hours played in endwalker was kinda low compared to how many players were subbed, right? That's by itself a worrying sign because those people are the closest to just stopping entirely, on top of more likely not engaging with the cashshop. I'm sure as business expert you know this though.
Also, how do you know people will actually quit over this supposedly insurmountable difficulty? People have complained about hades, shinryu, holminster, seat of sacrifice being far too hard. And yet they made it through.