Quote Originally Posted by Mana_Azir View Post
The premise of your notion is wrong to begin with and youre hyperfixating on it.
Thats cos youre missing a lot of nuance and context between EW and DT and why the latter is performing poorly. EW had better retention rates because the story in the msq, the first variant dungeon, 8man and 24man were decent enough to hold people as it delved with characters folks have been wanting to interact with for ages.
People were also more hopeful that a lot of the problems pointed out during EW's runtime would get sorted in the expansion itself alas it did not. Then theres the group who decided to quit altogether cos they finished a major story arc and thats enough for them, they may or may not come back to see the next bit if it seems interesting enough. EW was where the decline started for the first time in a long while we started seeing a downwards trend that continued till 6.5 (many of the complaints had to do with things being too easy). Then it saw a resurgence in 7.0 only for it to drop cos how divisive the story ended up being...
Folks arent saying "X" is bad cos its hard, rather cos its designed poorly after having 10years of data from running the game
I don't think EW retention was because of the story, I think it was because FF14 is just a massive game and a lot of new players (the so called WoW Exodus) hadn't even been in Stormblood when Endwalker was released. They caught up with the many content droughts up to 6.5 and just wondered "where did all the content go" once they finished 7.0.

A lot of people reduced their playtime because they thought Dawntrail would shake things up, and it ended up being the same thing all over again. We're talking retention here, the story is a poor choice for a reason people don't stay because once you finish the story most players don't touch it again, what keeps people in is always what content is there available and how fun they find doing it.