Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
It is actually very popular right now, all things considered. This isn't the age of the MMO anymore like it was in the early 2000's. WoW achieved its amazing feat by creating a casual-friendly game at the perfect time the genre itself was peaking. Speaking frankly, you could design the literal perfect MMO right now and you still wouldn't come close to reaching WoW's peak, simply because you have an entire younger generation of gamers who have moved away from long-term MMO's and to the immediate gratification of the Mobile, MOBA, and FTP genres. In this day and age, an FTP w/ microtransactions on a mobile device is always going to get more players than a subscription-based MMO. That's just reality.

Given that environment, EW has been an enormous success. It blew away all previous xpacs, and even the late-patch troughs (which happen in *every* game in this genre) are still miles above the number of players during similar late-patch troughs in previous expansions. Take a trip around YT or even Reddit (of all places) and you'll see a massive amount of praise for EW.
The FF14 subreddit has been tongue-bathing the game since at least the time I started playing in Shadowbringers 5.2.