At this point will FFXIV collapse if all mods and third party tools disappear?

[Shurrikhan]

First step is getting people who don't care about how they play to care. At the end of the day, people are paying a sub to do whatever they want in the game. If someone wants to spend 6h ERPing in a house before spamming Cure 1 in all roulettes, why would they bother to care about doing more damage or optimizing?

The analysis would be good for those who want it but completely ignored by those who don't and the problem still wouldn't be solved for anyone who wants people to perform at their best.

I feel like we too often assume that those who don't care do so out of willful avoidance rather than simply because they haven't been given a reason to find the learning itself engaging. Most people learn when learning is fun. Yes, some part of that incentive can rely on externalities like progression, but they can only go so far without becoming self-defeating; at the end of the day, a lot relies on intrinsics -- namely how the experience itself frames that learning.

If tiny fraction of a percent of players will nonetheless purposely play poorly out of spite, sure, there's no helping that, and likely even an otherwise very conservative/lenient/"hyper-accessible" level of gatekeeping will, well, gatekeep them, likely for the best for the game's total population regardless (given how many would leave over otherwise dealing with them). But I suspect more can be given reason to enjoy that learning and thereby end up caring simply as a side-effect.