So just curious but how come there's no ff14 private servers?

[Jeeqbit]

For context, I recently learned that private servers for other games exist

The reason is because other games did something major to make their players want to go back to a previous version of the game. A good example of that is classic WoW, which WoW ceased to resemble so people wanted it back that much.

In FFXIV, we can continue to do old content with the minimum item level and silence echo settings and still experience it regularly in roulettes. We can sync down to the rotation we had at a previous expansion. Of course, there have been changes to some classes at lower levels and less important actions have been pruned or merged from the lower levels over time, but the essence is mostly still there.

For example, at level 50 a PLD has always spammed the Rage of Halone combo and still does now. A DRG has always rotated between two combos at that level and used Dragonfire Dive and Jump at that level and still does.

The changes to the game have, generally, just been positive ones. Almost every change I've seen in patches have been things that people have thought should happen for years (we call it Quality of Life).

When cross-class skills were removed, it was because people were saying it was annoying leveling other jobs they don't care about to get important skills. When Parry was replaced with Tenacity, it was because Parry wasn't even worth it and although people may not choose Tenacity now, it at least does what it's supposed to (mitigates tank busters) which Parry often didn't. When Featherfoot was removed, nobody noticed (because it was useless and increased evasion on a DPS when DPS don't tank things much). These are the sort of changes we have got for most of the game's life - changes which people had been asking for or that just made sense. So there hasn't been a reason to want to go back.

For all the people who talk up Heavensward, it was full of jank, useless stats, useless items, useless abilities, grindy systems, unintuitive mechanics that turned people away and the game is a lot more polished and fine-tuned now.