The slow decline of FFXIV, a summary.

[Supersnow845]

Okay, finally watched the video now that I had time. Here's a tl;dw for anyone else, since the video has a ton of filler in it, which I'll just tell myself is intentional meta-parody of the nature of FFXIV's narrative:

1. Game has grown too easy
2. Jobs too homogenized and over-simplified (DPS too easy, tank too strong, healer too useless)
3. Patch cycles getting longer but delivering less content
4. Over-catering to (E)RPers
5. Non-raid content is underwhelming
6. Dawntrail story bad, writing quality nosedive
7. Toxic, stalker-filled community
8. Formulaic content cycle, no casual/midcore content

I'm not familiar with the creator at all, so I'm going in completely unbiased here, and I'm commenting exclusively on the content, not the presentation or the jokes/asides or anything: It's really not a very good video. The case she makes for "FFXIV is in decline for these reasons" is vibes-based, and not evidence-based. Declining player numbers is a sort of evidence, but she fails to establish a meaningful causal link between any of her complaints and those declining numbers (Occam's razor would suggest that the increasingly slow content release cadence is far and away the biggest culprit).

"Totally preventable" is simply...totally unaddressed in the video. Not sure why it's in the title at all. I suppose the implication is "if the devs hadn't done all these things I'm complaining about, the game would be thriving at a level I deem acceptable," but even that weak argument is never explicitly stated.

Like most FFXIV content today, it treads zero new ground; it's basically the standard laundry list of complaints we see on this forum and reddit day in and day out.

For what it's worth, I do agree with basically all of her complaints. I always tend to attribute less importance to the story than other people, and don't view old job design through quite so rose-tinted glasses, but I found myself nodding along with basically everything. I'm just saying that she did not make a persuasive case for her thesis. She just complained about a bunch of stuff I happen to agree with.

Here’s a question for you because I don’t fully disagree with your point that “the said a lot of things but didn’t necessarily back up her points”

What evidence could she have provided? This game doesn’t share player numbers publicly and we only have fragmented data. She can point to what has changed and what most listening posts are unhappy about but ultimately we don’t know if these changes are or aren’t popular because again it’s squares data

What could Lucy have reasonably done differently that would have made you support her point more?