Quote Originally Posted by SieyaM View Post
To honestly discuss the topic I will say that we have been doing a lot of the same things for a long time, and without something changing or bringing a renewed energy to the game it will probably experience slow decline. That isn't really that unusual for the MMO space though, no one remains on top forever and XIV isn't any different. I doubt it will actually shut down any time soon, but will probably end up in the same state as XI in a few more expansions with a small but dedicated community keeping it aloft.
When you consider time-scales, "a few more expansions" can mean something like 6+ years away, which is a huge amount of time.

I say this because there's still a queue whenever I login, no matter the time. I remember there not being a queue before Endwalker was released. Also, we have Xbox players joining the fray.
The login queue is a result of the login server now processing logins in "batches" rather than continuously. It's not an actual reflection of the state of the game. That said, the game clearly has an extremely healthy population at the moment, given things like Aether hunt trains going back to server-specific instead of being announced DC-wide with the latest patch because of how large they were getting.