Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
WOW is still the largest MMO, we are close but WOW still holds it, and WOW maintains that title partially because they balance their casual and endgame content and have a decent difficulty levelling curve

14 just jumps from “cure 1 spam is fine to 99% of your GCD’s must be glare or we will enrage” with absolutely no middle ground and it’s a big part of why we have such poor capped population retention
It's honestly hard to respond to a post when nothing in that post seems connected to reality. WoW is probably still the largest in terms of pure players, but the trajectory it's going on is abysmal compared to FFXIV. It's not really considered the "best MMO" at the moment; it's just desperately hanging on to the small % of its original playerbase, which was plummeted, while FFXIV is enjoying its most played expansion to date.

Someone else already covered the lack of "balance" in WoW, and it's very well known for its "raid or die" mentality at end-game. There's practically nothing for the casual player there, compared to the veritable mountain of non-raid side content available in FFXIV.

And what's that about "poor capped player retention"? Frankly, I haven't seen that at all. You get the natural mid-to-late patch population dips that happen in _every_ MMO in existence, but in EW even those troughs maintain a significantly higher playerbase than similar troughs in past expansions. That "poor retention" simply doesn't exist relative to any other game in the genre.