"I'm waiting until 7.3 to see if I'll quit"

[Halivel]

I think the refusal to calmly discuss the fact DT's general difficulty being higher across the board has likely pushed out a substantial number of players is a little sad. We're all in the "hardcore" side of the player base just by being engaged enough to use the official forum, but I really think it's a problem for player retention to suddenly remove the easy mode for everyone.

There are absolutely gamers that enjoy the process of the story and fetch quests and exploration EXCLUSIVELY. FFXIV always had that until Dawntrail's demands. How many of us suddenly feel the pain of snapshotting unfairly hitting us despite what our eyes show us on screen. That's BAD.

I sometimes wonder how many of those who left were players from the period of time when Asmon brought in a huge number of new players along with him. If I recall correctly, that's when the Shadowbringers jump-up happened, and realistically speaking ShB and early EW were capable of satisfying a very wide range of players, while the reset of the game - not necessarily.

It absolutely wouldn't explain the number of active players going down in almost half from what it was in 6.0, but I can fairly easily see some players facing FF14's more "standard" antics and going "nope, thanks, I'm out".

But in order to answer that question one would have to know how many of those players stayed through ShB-EW in the first place, and we probably don't have statistics for that?