
Originally Posted by
Amarande
I want to say the biggest reason for endgame burnout is the pace that the community expects of players, which is literally even more stringent than WoW's of all things, and the fact that XIV's community is built around the "unity" part of "community" to such an unhealthy level.
Ideally, you should be able to take your time, gear up, and push through Savage (or EX, too) at the pace which you find comfortable.
In reality, it turns out anything but. PF puts up the Duty Complete wall as soon as it possibly can get away with it, so there's an uncomfortable push to always rush content as soon as it comes out, and thus correspondingly to have to tackle it with the very minimum gear or close, as if you take your time you are cut off from an increasingly large portion of the playerbase and increasingly forced to stew with the crowd that has two left feet (plus, with the way mechanics are nowadays, it does not take a very high percentage of the playerbase to be stumblebums to make the majority of parties effective non-starters from the very first).
The community's compassion for the left behind is extremely poor, with the dominant response to complaint about this state of affairs being "well, you should have rushed it when everyone else was." In other words, exacerbating the whole "you need to week one it" (or in the case of EX, often day one it, and too bad if you work full time on Tuesday) mentality that contributes so much stress.
Almost everything in XIV tends to be dominated by a very small number of large Discord communities, so alternative mindsets also tend to be heavily suppressed in this way too (especially due to the extreme weakness of FCs compared to guilds in virtually every other MMO in regards to endgame activity) - failure to conform to the established culture inevitably results in the moderators issuing the "shut up or pack up (and go)" ultimatum (just ask me how I know, lol). Due in no small part to the outsized weight of responsibility Discord places on community owners even among social media as a whole, it is much more difficult than many realize to organize a competing community compared to the old days, though.
I'm honestly not sure where the solution lies here myself.