Xenosys Vex explains how to save the game

[Noumenon]

Despite all its flaws and being built on the same stale combat system EW can at least claim the somewhat dubious title of “expansion where they tried quite a bit of new content”

But then you look at all the content and it all died on patch, nobody runs CV dungeons, nobody interacts with IS besides setting up the weekly spreadsheet, it’s all just there

Meanwhile 2 expansion old field content still has a massive and lively playerbase because there is so many glam and mount accessories locked behind eureka

If people truly didn’t care for mounts and glams eureka would have died on patch on CV would be flourishing, instead it’s the reverse

I'm sorry but this is ridiculous - neither of those content are lively nor have a massive playerbase. Most people actually do Criterion in statics, and the amount of people using PF as an indicator is mind-boggling. If you look in recruitment Discords, barely anyone does Criterion, but it's certainly high enough that it's above 100 a day on patch. But the same goes for Eureka - there's maybe one or two BA runs every day or so on Aether. On average, less than 100 people participate in BA every day. It's frankly ridiculous to say that Eureka has a "massive and lively playerbase" when it can barely fill an instance on Aether. And on DCs like Dynamis, it's practically just bots and no real humans.

EW cannot claim to "try a bit of new content". Can anyone with a straight face say that Variant dungeons are innovative? It's three linear corridors mashed into one, with the "innovation" being giving you a paragraph of lore whether you knock a tree down or not. Does that really pass as "innovation" these days? Have our standards got so low?

Island Sanctuary is by far the most unique new types of content they've done in Endwalker, but it's horribly designed and serves only as a case study of how you should not be innovating. Island Sanctuary has a higher completion rate than on-patch Eureka, but the content is even more dull, even more braindead than on-patch Anemos. No one can seriously say that they actually tried to innovate when it comes to IS. Trying implies effort, and IS has none. If I splash paint randomly on the floor, it is certainly unique, but the word "innovative" has a positive connotation, and it most certainly should not be used on that mess of a floor.

If FF14 aims to retain players by satisfying either:

--- the people who want a mindless grind (at the extreme, those achievement hunters who grind for 20,000 Accursed hoards in PotD by repeating Floors 1-20 again and again)
--- the people who want to do next to nothing and get everything they want (extreme casual players who treat this game as Second Life and love the new tomestome weapons)

Then this game is going to die.

Because it was never about them.

Because most gamers care not about the carrots but about the actual meat, the substance of the gameplay. And most of these players have long since quit, which is why we have a remaining echo chamber of players fighting over rewards when players should be debating over how to make the actual gameplay more fun.

The context, for one. Watch his vid again, then read my original post.

Also, you're putting word in my mouth, I literally said NONE of what you're claiming I said.

Also noted that I was very carefully said his point is NOT invalid, rather it's coming from a very narrowed/limited perspective.

Exactly what are you saying then? Why are you bringing up your experience of grinding alliance raids for months to get every piece of glamour and then concluding that you speak for a lot of players and that players don't want it to be grindier?

Glamour = reward.

Hence, you're saying that you're satisfied with the rewards you get from grinding and that it is at an appropriate level of grind for you.

I am saying the debate over what level of grind is appropriate or what rewards should be behind those grinds is far from the primary concern or even the primary issue that plagues FF14 today - the staleness of gameplay. I am saying your disagreement with Xeno completely misses the mark on why this game has a 20% churn rate every patch, and why the vast, vast majority of players who played in HW and SB have long since unsubbed. It's like debating whether a patient dying from lung cancer should be treated with natural remedies or surgery for the fifth pimple on his thigh.