What was they thinking when they did variant dungeons and criterion

[Alleo]

Has it? As far as I can remember, people weren't this critical about Shadowbringers when it came out.

The forums were. Just like we had a lot of topics when Eureka came out in Stormblood, there were lots of topics in Shadowbringers too. (And we even had the Raubahn savage problem in Stormblood) A huge storm about the gender restricted races (and rightfully so imo), quite a few threads about how we barely get content anymore. Disappointment (but not as much as Eureka) with Bozja. Housing was also always something brought up.

There are many minor things that have been discussed in many expansions. And there are quite a few regular posters here that have bascially declared every recent expansion as their breaking point. They are still here. So yeah I dont think Endwalker is much more controvers than any other expansion. At least on this forum.

Outside of it, it got the praise it always gets. High raitings, awards, favorable articles and a huge amount of positive comments under FF14 videos. I dont remember any huge negative comments under any of the content creators I watched. No, many where emotional about the story, loving certain characters that are hated deeply by some here and more.

The forum can be a indicator. Some of the storms here did represent the situation ingame. People hated the two old Diadems and the content died inside so fast...people really disliked Eureka and the Lucky Bancho showed that only a quite low amount did it at the time it was relevant. And that was with the relic behind it. But that does not mean that everything is that way. Sometimes there are huge threads here that are bascially the same few people talking for hundreds of pages with sometimes new people coming in. That does not indicate the state of the game or the opinion of many players.

Edit: And if we just look at this forum.
The thread about bunny boys as a race had (if I remember it correctly) over 1.000 likes on the OP post. Which means that over a thousand people at least used the forum once to vote for it. The biggest endwalker thread which would be the one with over 700 pages about the bad story had 180 likes in the OP. That is a bit more than 10% of the people voting for bunny boys. In the very same thread just a few posts under the OP we have the one that says that they like the story. This post has nearly double the amount of likes than the OP.

Take from that what you want, just wanted to point that out.