Quote Originally Posted by Skiros View Post
Guess what, the majority of your playerbase is midcore. Not casual players who have a panic attack when they need to use more than three buttons on their hotbars. Not hardcore players who clear the tier in 16 hours.
It's just such a generalization to fit your narrative. People quit wow because it was not fun to play. For years slowly growing to a critical mass that blew up during perfect storm of bad expansion, lawsuit/really horrific news and Asmon showcasing FF14 as a good normal game.

The game did whatever it took to make "hardcore" players life more annoying. From tier to tier in the last 2-ish expansion it become harder and harder to gear up for the mythic opening by restricting trading/split runs efficiency (but never completely preventing pre-gearing thus forcing mythic guilds to pre-gear). Then RNG systems like legendaries or current covenants that just forced pro players to have multiple copies of same character - same class, just different covenant or new character just because previous one got unlucky with it first two legendaries. And as they are bad at balancing we had cases or Benthic gear that overshadowed mythic gear or corruptions that made the tier pay to win with corrupted BoEs (and screwing anyone without a wallet or big guild help).

Anyone below high-end the systems weren't supposed to have an impact but they did... and at some point it's not fun any more - expansion gives you 4 cool new spells but you have to choose one, or your legendaries, corruption are RNG to force you into months of continuous grind just to "catch up" to lucky ones that got it early.

Then add lack of content to then get constantly the same very basic content and "retention metrics" designed grinds ensuring Blizzard gets months of subs.

I permanently quit just before 9.0.5. at some point I had to go do weekly Thorgast runs just because of weekly resets. I was there pressing one button, wasting like 2h while I wanted to play HS Battlegrounds... but no, WoW won't let you, it will require months of "presence" just that you don't unsub till next patch or you will fall behind hard.

And they even managed to screw their golden goose like M+ by trying to make it some competitive esports.

FF14 is not WoW and I don't see any WoW problems here. It has and can have it own problems but that's another topic. I'm kind of dissapointed you didn't mentioned "PvP as a way forward" or other game design memes.


Quote Originally Posted by Skiros View Post
People mock WoW's peaks and falls between expansions, but FF14's drops are bigger, sometimes by 50%.
I didn't played FF this week. My alt jobs will wait till I return while my main job isn't loosing any FOMO system. Playing a MMO without a freaking calendar and only when I want to is such a shocker, isn't it?