Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
The sprout icon does need to persist for longer. I suspect its drop off point has not been updated in quite a while.
They've updated when the sprout icon gets turned off a couple of times now, most recently at the start of Shadowbringers. At the moment, the sprout icon turns off when you complete all of Stormblood's MSQ content and also have 168 total hours of /playtime. (It might be starting Shadowbringer's MSQ that triggers it, but I don't actually know. They're so close to being the same thing that they're effectively the same.)

This means that if someone never progresses past Stormblood on a character then they will never lose their sprout status on that character without manually turning it off. If a new player buys a level and story skip to get to Shadowbringer's content right away then they will still have 168 hours of logged-in time before losing the status. With how short ARR is now, it's also more conceivable that a new player or alt could have less than 168 hours playtime and reach Shadowbringer's and so still keep the icon until they reach that amount of time.