So SE has officially stated their MMO profits have tanked.

[TheRealDesastr]

I always wonder how many of those people are "real" new players to the MMO genre. Because every time people tell me they wanted to bring friends into the game and they left because of ARR it was ALWAYS WoW players.
I honestly don't consider WoW players who try out FF14 as real "new players", because very often especially WoW players already start most MMOs with the WoW-mindset (which often means rushing to endgame).

I honestly rarely see people who played other MMOs or played other games and not WoW do the same.
It honestly seems to me like WoW had ruined the mindset of some its players long-term, which is why many of them usually skip everything and don't even read quest texts.

I had very good experiences with new players who never played WoW and usually those people stuck.

On the other hand I tried to bring two WoW players into this game and they usually rushed the leveling, skipped every cutscene and tried to rush till endgame until they eventually quit.
But I honestly would say they ruined the game for themselves by approaching it with the same mindset they did in WoW.

I mean... I'm a WoW player who stayed. You can push forward this notion all you'd like, but the numbers show the facts here. Alls I see are people defending ARR like it's just fine and not an issue. While the game continues to hemorrhage people across the board. The toxic positivity is as bad in XIV community as the toxic negativity is in WoW. There is no balance, and the 'everything is just fine' thing regarding the story is that one dog sitting in a burning house meme 'this is fine'.

Thing is, I don't introduce WoW players. I introduced my siblings and friends who had never touched MMORPGs before. So your 'speculation' goes out of the window right there. They didn't have any predetermined notions of the game.

And at the end of the day, regardless, a new player to FFXIV is a new player to FFXIV. New to the genre or not. If they played WoW or not really shouldn't make their feedback any less valuable. As... again, WoW is a competitor, as it should be, and different perspectives are a good thing even if you disagree. At the moment, the state of FFXIV clearly shows it's needing to improve. People are sharing their grievances. I don't agree with the toxicity in WoW, but I don't like the 'everything is fine' thing FFXIV seems to have (which is clearly wrong - factually, given numbers, even).