I've put far more time into this game than any other, but with no innovation I don't see myself spending much time on it going forwards. It really felt like the 2019 expansion was the right time to shake things up in a major way to keep it fresh but it didn't happen. Now we've reached the 7th anniversary of ARR and I just can't get excited about the same formula continuing.

In my opinion 7 years is too long to keep doing the same thing and not have any surprises (to the core content). With a certain cadence they just keep incrementing the item level, plugging in the next dungeon/ trial/ raids with an alternating pattern between normal and alliance, etc. Yes it's the same formula since v2.0 Aug 2013 for those who haven't been around that long (I started in 2012, before I had a forum account).

It feels like they are in a rut creatively and just repeating things because that's what we do. On one of the recent LL streams they didn't show much of the new tribe because "everyone knows how tribes work by now." Yeah, the tribe content is just spending a few minutes per day clicking on a few things, because that's how they've always worked. I'd rather they not add stuff like that unless it offers a new kind of experience, because we already have a lot of old tribes that work the same way so it starts feeling redundant and pointless busy work to unlock the reward and then never touch again.

User engagement and growth apparently didn't slow down during the content drought / delays caused by adjusting operations to the pandemic. I am happy for their success but it means they aren't pressured to take any risks, change their gameplay systems or repetitive content/reward structures. So for me personally I'm treating patch 5.3 as the end of the FF XIV story and no longer maintaining my subscription every month unless they come back with an exciting overhaul of the game.