Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Amarande]

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs. They cannnot progress any further, especially if, as Yoshi has said, it will get even more difficult.

I know my post is coming from only one part of the fandom, but I also know that many other parts are unhappy, so what should they do ... or will they go down the Blizz route and not listen to anyone?

Ironically, Blizz may lead FFXIV even further down this path of phasing us older hands out - Midnight is moving BIGLY to be casual raider friendly (see for instance the complete crackdown on any and all combat addons, which also implies the competitive, nitpicky logging will be gone from the game as well and the only public player records will be ones like Rio that draw from what is openly published on the Blizzard site), which will likely incentivize XIV to curry the hardcore crowd further (plus there will doubtless be "community" astroturf organized by FFLogs as it will literally be the only thing sustaining their business).

I don't trully understand what is there to gain if the hard content is being made by 3% of total ammount of people.
I ain't want to play a dead game where i'am unable to socialise because others just left.

Wasn't XIV made to be for everyone?

Not anymore it seems. There's a lot of content that seems intentionally designed with the expectation of a small clear rate, I guess "everyone else can just watch the stream" is good enough now.

I get a vibe that it wasn't the easiness of Endwalker that led to this, but the disaster that was its launch - I think there is a good chance this led SE to the conclusion that they were going to have to pick an actual target audience as the servers can no longer handle being "for everyone" during the busiest burst periods (and due to systems like housing, dynamically adding and removing worlds really won't work, either).

My problem with savage isn't the "difficulty", it's just a memory game at the end of the day, my issue is that it's just a memory game - there is no skill expression, the mandatory damage is carefully calibrated to not kill you as long as the right buttons are pressed and the fail damage causes a wipe then and there, no room for healers to save the run, no room for tanks to do anything to save the run, no room for good dps players to beat the dps check anyway just "you slipped up, back to the start." From what I'm told Ultimate is the same but longer.

Yep. No agency. Vuln stacks teach you from early on really that "you survived the AoE" isn't enough, they want you to do every mechanic a specific way. (In their defense I'm not sure there is a way to preserve the cinematic experience they have in mind without such railroading: players will cheese and optimize the fun out of everything after all.)

Mind you, maybe we should have expected "it was ever so" since this was basically how they approached the AV fight all the way back in FFXI, though ...