FFXIV population decline continues

[BarretOblivion]

Main issue is competition, maybe not in MMO standards are increasing. People are playing other games that have recently released.
You have other issues like lack of "evolutions" of job designs from EW to now outside of further dumbing down of jobs and their identities with "reworks to job identity" promised next expansion instead of THIS expansion that people were clamouring for.
The gear grind is getting stale, especially with the "new" types of content to better bridge the gaps between roullettes and savage raiding coming out far too late in a raid tier instead of soon after or day one of the raid tier to add "variety" to the players.
Not making enough content for casual players while dumbing down the content you make for hardcore players because you are hoping those casual players will be "hardcores" at some point and don't ever do so because the prior point.
This has been a very weak expansion. I joined in HW and SB was my first current expansion I played through. That expansion people said was the worst one but... I can't say it was "bad". This expansion is just... unremarkable, far too tone deaf in the trying to be "safe" when they stuck with systems for 1 expansion too long.

[NamiRocket]

Main issue is competition, maybe not in MMO standards are increasing. People are playing other games that have recently released.

This is the thing people really aren't considering. Sure, the game may have gotten stale in a number of ways and that's for sure also a contributing factor, but there are increasingly a larger number of big, successful, often multiplayer games out right now that people are playing, too. People have finite amounts of both money and time, so it doesn't even have to be another MMORPG that's taking up all of both.

That said, another MMORPG is definitely one of those games. FFXIV's closest neighbor in the space, World of Warcraft, released their newest expansion, The War Within, just less than two months after Dawntrail dropped. While Dawntrail had kind of a lukewarm reception, The War Within was received extremely well and continues being a huge success for Blizzard. They really turned it around in Dragonflight and that's finally started paying off. This is the first time both games have had an expansion release in the same year (they used to alternate years before Endwalker lasted three of them instead of two).

Creative Studio III, or more appropriately Square Enix themselves, probably need to take a look at the game and consider making changes to how they do things as well. And I don't mean in how they write the story. People will always come back for the 20+ hours of new MSQ and dungeon content at the start of every expansion. I mean in how they approach everything after that. Because, while Creative Studio III themselves are okay with you stepping away and playing other games during downtime, Square Enix clearly are not. The game is a money maker and they need to fund it better than they clearly are if they want it to do better than it currently is.