The content should be enjoyed by all players?

[Striker44]

As I've opined before, I'm starting to wonder what SE's notion of what "the community" actually is is: there seems to be a massive disconnect between what "the community wants" and what the vast majority of players I interact with are actually experiencing.

There's really only three things I can think of at this point that could consistently hold water -

a) that SE really isn't aware of the situation (and is only just now waking up to it because Japanese players are getting fed up much more vocally now)

b) that SE doesn't consider the casual endgame player to be a priority demographic anymore because of the gameplay cadence - in other words, in a game like WoW, it is much more important that the game let you bring along a newly recruited friend to endgame content, because you are brought to endgame content so quickly that most would quit after one month's sub for want of meaningful stuff to do otherwise. In a game like XIV, endgame activity is much more confined to existing experienced players because of the MSQ (barring boosts or cutscene skipping (NUUU DON'T), a new player a month in is probably still making their way through Heavensward, maybe moving on into Stormblood ... in any case, nowhere near even unlocking endgame content.

c) that SE is tacitly but deliberately catering the game to Discord communities and streamers (motivation unclear, perhaps to reduce customer service load by forcing people to fit in with specific player communities in order to play, and hoping the misfits will just quit? Reminds me of the Guild Leveling system Blizzard added in Cataclysm and eventually scrapped)

I'd add one other possibility to consider - we as people have a natural tendency to group with other like-minded people, meaning the "vast majority of players I interact with" are really an infinitesimally small grain of sand in comparison to the larger playerbase, but are all similar in their own gaming personalities. Quick version - SE has the big picture of the larger playerbase, whereas we as individuals have only the smallest, smallest, smallest little snapshots of it.

WoW actually TRIES new stuff, they got dragonriding, we got what... a mount tilt?

WoW's dragonriding was the result of them getting absolutely trashed when they tried getting rid of flying completely.