Big agree on going somewhere far away. My two favorite expansions, HW and ShB, were in part because we were able to just get away from everything and explore a wholly new environment with its own politics and culture. I know being teleported to another world is done to death but the foundation is there already with the other shards. And the game's writers tend to shine when they're allowed to break out of the box a bit and just write a cool story without worrying about how it clashes with 12 years of established Eorzean lore.

Failing that, even just an acknowledgement of how things are would go a long way. Communication is so big. But I don't think the XIV team even realizes there's a problem. From their perspective, they released a deep dungeon, a new "hardcore" dungeon format, a relic, they're dropping alliance raids/savage raids/ex raids/unreal updates on a good enough schedule, and they gave everyone a private island. If players are quitting, the devs assume, it's because they're taking expected breaks. The cash shop makes up for their absence. And there are enough active players in their metrics (clubbers and social gang) to support their feelings on the game being fine. But the reality is the content they implement lacks replayability. The deep dungeon is the same deep dungeon we've always had. Variant dungeons fell off hard after about a week and never came back. The island is just a timegated slog. I could go on but what's the point. The devs don't see this. I swear they're just reading metrics and they equate the players online idling and doing beesknees in a basement with a sign that the game's in a healthy state. Hell, someone's gonna reply to this post saying there isn't a problem because in their mind 6 hours of content every 4 months is completely fine. This is why I'm sort of not expecting it to get better. Just acknowledging that there's a problem in the first place is like climbing a mountain.