Quote Originally Posted by Aravell View Post
They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!
If we could somehow get metrics on what type of effect job simplification has on the population of players, that would be a different story, but it's impossible to do this because each expansion is not just a change in jobs, but dozens of different attributes of the game. Even simply the time that an expansion comes out can have an effect on someone's interest in the game, so we don't really have a way to isolate this metric to gauge its exact impact in a vacuum.

But we can see what people say and how people react to the game. I would be shocked if someone could name a single person who's approach to an expansion like Shadowbringers or Endwalker would look something like this: "You know, FFXIV has always been too complicated, but since I read they're streamlining job design, I think I want to play it now." Because as you said, it's the story that has driven players to try FFXIV (and the increase in the game's marketing budget). You can find dozens of examples of people talking about hearing how good the story is, and total radio silence on people talking about how people hype up the job design. The most I could imagine would be hyping up the job system in the sense that you can play different jobs on a single character, which has nothing to do with the design of the jobs themselves.