Quote Originally Posted by Rueby View Post
Well, speaking personally, the friends I have left from when I first started (very early ShB) have all had negative sentiments that started from post Endwalker, I share them too.
Ever since I've started playing I've been in love with the game, the story and all else, I could say I was a FFXIV shill having come from Bugwars 2. The concept of Live Letters and devs actually communicating with us felt hmm... personal I guess. I never cared much about my character, the story or NPCs as much as I did in this game and I think it's really unique that they managed to create this kind of experience...

After EW, I've essentially been playing this game solo, all the people I'm familiar with are gone. My close friend whom I met in this game and known for years is considering quitting for good and I know how much we both love this game. DT was the first time I started contemplating leaving the game, every memory felt like it was tarnished, one way or another. Perhaps I haven't been around for long and perhaps the rose tinted glasses and the honeymoon phase of ShB wore off...

I've been pretty sad everytime they sloppily change something, I've been fearful of playing the MSQ and/or unlocking new content out of fear of eyestrain that I never had in any game before prior to the 7.0 Graphical Update.

Not that I'm missing much, the quality of the MSQ has taken a nose dive since post EW and honestly the only reason I don't skip (though I really want to) is to see it for myself.

All this could be meaningless, perhaps their target audience is the new green player who just has so much content to do and give em a few years and cycle out the old and bring in the new.
I know that stories like this are only anecdotal, but I've had similar; most of the people I played with during ShB largely went away by the middle of EW, and few of them came back for DT, even fewer have stayed for 7.1. At this point it's only a handful of FC members that I play with that still log on, the others only come back when there's a free login campaign.

The use of Steam charts can only tell part of the picture since it's only part of the playerbase, but it's still a rather large sample size we can work with, and as such shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because it doesn't include PS4/Xbox/etc. Barring major port issues, if 10% of Steam players up and left the game, there's a good chance that around 10% of the other platforms also lost players (give or take some margin of error) because of similar reasons to those Steam players.