Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
We were going to lose WOW refugees

That’s only a given if you do what 14 did……..absolutely nothing at all

If a competitor dumps half of thier customers in your lap for free you move heaven and earth to keep them not throw up your arms without even trying.

Not trying is just the name of the game at the moment
No. It's a given that you're going to lose them unless you seriously change major things about your game. By the time of the "WoW Exodus", it's population had dropped from an all-time high of around 12 million active players during WotLK to about 1/6 of that. That's still a ton of people, but it was well after they went all-in on the e-sports scene with M+, Arena Tournaments, and the like. The kind of player that was still around to be part of the exodus has a very different gaming profile than the kind of person that FFXIV was designed for (consider how widespread toxicity is in random groups in WoW compared to being very rare in FFXIV). To "keep" those people, FFXIV would have needed to change what it is at its core to be sufficiently similar to WoW, because most of those "refugees" still enjoy playing WoW-style games at heart. Again, they didn't come here because they loved the design of FFXIV; they came here because they were protesting something about WoW and we were the only other "hot" game on the market (plus had a few streamers come over - again a big difference).

The story was trash so the playerbase cratered and the longer patch cycle means it craters harder
I'll ask again - how has the playerbase "cratered"? Someone posted the Steam charts. At this point (8 months after expansion release), the average number of daily logins has declined by ~40%. At the same point in EW, it had declined by ~49%. At the same point in ShB (largely considered the "best" expansion the game has had), it had declined by ~39%. I see nothing outside the normal cyclical nature of the population occurring.