Why do long time players play the game so differently?

[Nethereal]

There have been quiet a few, unironically.

There was the 2012 to 2014 era for Mists of Pandaria which, between pandas as a playable race and the long content drought at the end of the last patch which lasted 14 months, created a slow loss of players but we are talking going from like 8 million to 6.4 million players.

Then there was the 2014 to 2016 era one known was Warlords of Draenor, which the only things you could really praise was the dungeons and raiding experience, everything else was barebones. The playerbase briefly shot up from 6.4 million to 10 million players and then the following month lost about as many players, then kept sinking down till it went below 5 million in which Blizzard stopped posting the sub count. Take with a grain of salt from mmo-population, but it dipped well below 1 million. So fastforward for WoW, with Shadowlands, a similar trend happened based on its peaks and valleys and ravines for player count, but it also featured a long content drought from its 9.0 to its 9.1 patch.

I always found that to be such a funny situation.

Blizzard with 10-13 million active subscribers: We're better than you, believe it.
Blizzard below 5 million active subscribers and still decreasing: We don't feel like active subscriber count properly portrays the successfulness of our games.

[Ariabeth]

What do you base this off of? How big is your sample pool, and where did you get the players in your sample pool from?

If it's just your friend group, then your sample pool is biased to what your friend group aims towards.
Let's say they were hardcore Ultimate/Savage raiders, then your post would be quite different.
If you got your results from Limsa, you would get entirely different results than from Radz At Han.

But none of this matters.
I don't see why you should care where other players in this game set their goalpost at.

Ask yourself the question: Do I want to hit gold parses in every savage?
If the answer is no; What do I want to do in this game?

But seeing you call yourself a new player with a join date of 6 years ago,
I am not sure if anyone can take you serious if you can't take your own post serious.

[hagare]

there are people who only play mahjong in this game... I seen a vid a bout a guy who just leveled his char, entered the saucer, and never came out xD but has the mahjong achievement. If thats what they wanna do let them.

There's Mahjong in FF14 now!?
I really gotta pay golden saucer a visit

[Vesuvias]

I'll bite on this one, I've been playing the game for quite some time. Quit several times, burned out several times. At this point in my XIV "career" if we wanna call it that, I play to enjoy myself and run with some friends when it suits. I no longer bother with raiding as it just has grown old and results in more drama than I care to deal with. They have also taken many of the classes that I have played since HW/ARR (DRK, BLM, and SCH) are no longer the classes I played back when I really was really deep in the raid scene and no im mostly a filthy casual at this point lol.

[Kewitt]

Been here since 1.0 beta.
As a dancer I'm often out pacing other dps.
I know when I'm not playing at my skill level. But my skill I got so much going on I just can't be bothered to improve.
I'm very happy when I see other dancer out dps me. But that is 1 in 10
I also play warrior. I always have my stance on and I know how to use shirk. When the other take wants to main tank or forgets to stance up.
I rarely if ever see dps use lowblow which is supper useful.

Also at 80% effort I can clear all but ultimate content.

[Merrigan]

To respond in a serious manner to a post that is not:

1. Because improving on an MMO... Well, it can seem very redundant. For a result that doesn't bring much. Yes, you will have cleaned the savage / mythical level; you have the honor of starting the BIS race again. Again.

I like to do HL (or try to) from time to time, but I for one never understood people who repeated this race In ALL expansions.

2. Optimization in video games is a very contemporary disease. For the record, I recently started KOTOR 2. I started the games very late, so I have a lot of catching up to do. And my first questions were "how do I optimize the character?" / "what am I missing if I play RP here and don't prioritize influence?"

Questions that I was answered with "but damn it, just have fun. We weren't trying to make the perfect run before."

The two (FFXIV, an MMO; KOTOR, an rpg) are very different games. But I think the desire to optimize, to look for THE right build is something that is becoming more and more common. Even in games that don't call for this kind of gameplay at all (TW3).

Maybe that's another possible explanation, and that our habits have drastically evolved in this respect, while others remained in a pure leisure perspective.

[Pells]

Why do long-time players not play the marketboard?

... because we've had 999,999,999 gil for years, and don't need anymore.

I'm still waiting for something to spend it on.

[elioaiko]

Simply put, I play to raid, clear, and gear up.

I like the satisfaction of clearing hard content but over time, you just become less invested because of a 2 reasons.

Burnout and predictablity.

Burnout. Long time players are used to lulls and not having content. Casual players play for social aspect, others want to parse and leaderboard chase, RP, and housing. Typically, most long time players know what to expect and try not to push themselves to doing content so much after release because we'll, that's all they'll have for awhile. I found myself burning out, and picking up another game while raid logging. It's the intention of the devs, they don't want an endless grind and expect players to play other games while they work on the next cycle of content.

Predictablity. The game's content cycle is so predictable, people tend to gloss over them or expect them while looking for crumbs of new content additions. Players get tired of the same routine with the same issues of content never lasting long enough than they can make it.

And lastly, my personal take. For newer players, it's exciting once you get the ball rolling to the endgame and learning how to raid and such. I remember finally pushing myself to the finish of SB when it was relevant. It was a whole new world. I logged on everyday, with the vast content the game has. I wanted to parse and improving my skills to be up there with the pros.

Over time, with those two reasons, you'll just come to the conclusion that everything is always going to be rinse and repeat. I stopped caring about hardcore improving because it's time-consuming. I learn the current xpac rotation and go into raids with the mindset of doing my best but not stressing over perfection. Because at the end of the day, I'm so used to the routine, I can pick it back up with half the effort.

Short answer: Enjoy the game if you're new. But it's you're a veteran, just take breaks. The game will be there and as long as you finish the what you wanted to keep up with the patch, play something else–it's better for your sanity in the long run.

[Novae]

Everything in this game is meaningless. Gear, gil, parse... the day you understand it, you just do the content a few times, collect new glams, level remaining jobs, then unsub until the next patch.
Hopefully, the next pvp update will shake the "meta".

[Zaniel]

I don't get it, does something fundamentally change about your gameplay once you spend a long time playing this game? These veteran players don't seem to be obsessed with the same things I and other newer players are obsessed with.

This isn't WoW, the objective is to enjoy yourself, not pucker up so hard you can shoot a golf ball 100 yards down range.