The Perfect Response to "Take a Break"

[Cilia]

I am not responsible for your reaction to criticism of FFXIV.

I neither said nor implied that you were.

It has been explained multiple times that for users such as myself at the point of purchasing Crysta the money has gone to SE and where they choose to allocate those funds is completely beyond our control. The Crysta I have purchased for FFXI has no doubt been funnelled into FFXIV over the years so unfortunately this tactic is not effective. However, as the chart posted by Deceptus shows, the player population is plummeting back down to the level of previous expansions after having completely failed to retain the WoW population boost.

Spoiler alert: where the money anybody spends on a subscription-based game goes is entirely unknown. Ideally it will be reinvested into the game itself, but nobody knows for sure. (You mean the money I spent on XIV might have been reinvested into Marvel's Avengers or, heavens forfend, Forspoken? G-gasp!) Whether you spent money on Crysta for XI is kind of irrelevant; if you aren't satisfied with the product, don't buy it. If you spent so much money on Crysta you can sub to this game every patch and even buy an expansion despite allegedly not playing and hating it all the same, you ought to find yourself a new hobby.

Player population always goes down between patches and expansions, and anyone doing a modicum of research could have told you post-6.0 MSQ would be kind of lackluster (as the 2.0 story arc concluded in 6.0 and they told us so, meaning the devs / writers were going to use 6.x as filler to get 7.0 written instead of leading to the expack's "True End" and setting up the next as per usual). CBU3 also had its hands full with XVI, and one thing Yoshi-P has said over the years is that the SE suits don't properly fund the game. Failing to retain the WoW population boost - at this point in time - is not as big of a deal as you seem to want it to be.