The slow decline of FFXIV, a summary.

[ForsakenRoe]

Why did it grew through endwalker ? ask you WHY not because of the great content, because the content is like always, the playerbase grew because of covid and the wow refugees, the covid time is gone, a lot of wow refugees are back to wow so the playerbase ofc sinks again, then like i said earlier between expansion release and x.2 there was always such a big drop

Yes, SE was gifted an incredible opportunity with the influx of players from WOW's temporary selfdestruction, and Covid. But rather than capitalizing on that opportunity, by adapting their development schedule to get more incentive out for those 'temporary' players to become more permanent additions to the playerbase, instead they kept doing what they were doing, and let the golden goose walk straight back out of the pen

and you get told instead "then you're not playing the right game for you, just go play something more aligned with your tastes". There is no winning with those.

This line infuriates me to no end. Because 'something more aligned to my tastes' WAS FFXIV. It's why I started playing it, back in HW. It's not that I'm not playing 'the right game for me', it's that 'the game that was right for me, decided to change to be not-right for me, because they wanted to appeal to another demographic'. So, lets use the logic in reverse: people who would not like HW design decisions, but DO like EW/DT design decisions, should they have been told to 'go play something more aligned with their tastes' going from HW to SB, or SB to SHB? No, because that line, no matter who it's being directed at, is patently absurd a stance to take. The game should appeal to many players, of many skill levels, by offering low skill floors and high skill ceilings in the Jobs, and by offering a variety of content difficulty levels. But over time, we've lost the former of those, and now the skill floor IS the skill ceiling for some Jobs (cough SMN).

So now, all of the 'goal to strive for' is baked into the content itself, which means that the burden of 'is the content fun' rests entirely on the design within that content. And not every fight can knock it out of the park, for example, P6S/P7S are dull as dishwater IMO, and P11S was a bit of a snore outside of the three main mechanics of the fight (Shadowed Messengers, Dark and Light, Letter of the Law). But, unlike older expansions, the Jobs (speaking from the POV of a Healer here) don't have enough meat left on the bone to compensate for the dull fight designs. In older expansions, we had dull fights like O6S, or O10S, but the level of 'the gameplay is bland' complaints was nowhere near what we see today, because even if Chadarnook was a literal training dummy, at least as a Healer we could mess about with trying to practice 'keep all of your DOTs up' and 'aim for zero healing GCDs used' (a goal that was not fully attainable in every Savage fight, even in BIS)