Quote Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato View Post
Final Fantasy XIV is no longer at its peak and Square Enix is taking the revenue to recoup their 70% loss in profits last year. It also "promoted" Naoki Yoshida and Natsuko Ishikawa to non-FFXIV projects to fix the company. So no, "we" aren't destroying FFXIV, Square Enix is. Just like so many other companies, it cut corners in its core product to save money and please shareholders. Fortunately, every other company is also in a race to the bottom and FFXIV is a tad slower than the others in its decline, so it's still worth playing. It'll soon become apparent though that the story will fail to draw new people and players won't stay excited about the new content due to floor-tanking and being clipped by lag. It's okay to enjoy the game as-is but people need realistic expectations and not to deify the devs.
The game is some of the most fun it's ever been and is matching it's Endwalker numbers in terms of players meaning its tying for most players it's ever had, and from the looks of things it's actually losing Expansion launch-day numbers at a slower rate than Endwalker did, which means the game is, objectively speaking, the healthiest it has ever been player-wise in the history of its existence.

People can whine about their WoL being on a beach vacation and letting Wuk Lamat do her thing for the first half of Dawntrail and claim that makes the story the worst thing ever made and a bunch of culture warriors can go give Dawntrail a negative steam review filled with transphobic slurs directed at Wuk Lamat's VA all they want, in terms of actual player retention and engagement FF14 is the best it's ever been right now.

I'd say YoshiP and the team are doing just fine, and if this is the quality of content they're going to continue putting out, then I'm very excited for the future of the game.

Y'all just need to stop with this doom-prophesying. Every expansion there's another round of "IS FF14 DYING????????" threads and the game continues to thrive.