Unsubbed Thread (Tell us why)

[CuteBucket]

I have the Unsubscribe page open in another tab and I keep looking back at it and debating going through with it. I have never once cancelled my subscription in the years I've been playing. I never even felt the need to come to the forums until that first benchmark trailer for Dawntrail hit and both my character's faces were botched beyond belief. I made an account to document the changes and report on how unacceptable I found them. But even though the Endwalker patches bored me and I wasn't enjoying the story as much, I still stuck around because I was bringing an alt through the game and having a good time replaying the story and just doing social stuff with friends and gposing. I would still find myself logging in almost every day just to say hi to friends and look at my characters.

My characters are gone. Years of joy seeing them when I log in is gone. They have been replaced with strangers I don't recognize. It's been two months and they still look like strangers. I break down crying when I have to look at their new faces for an extended amount of time. These are the vessels through which I interact with the game world and whose stories I've love to weave over years of writing and artwork. Without them, there may as well be no Final Fantasy XIV to me.

That alone makes it difficult to continue to log in and play. And then I played through Dawntrail.

Nothing could have prepared me for how truly wretched this story is. I preordered and bought the collectors edition of Dawntrail, thinking, "they haven't let me down yet over four expansions, why would they now? I've always found something to love and things to keep me engaged. I'm happy with another Stormblood quality story, I liked that expansion just fine." How wrong I was. The development of FFXVI clearly hurt Endwalker (which should have been two expansions) and its patches by pulling staff away from XIV to work on it, and whatever TWO other titles Square Enix is ordering CS3 make now is absolutely strangling the life out of XIV. No one is at the helm of this ship anymore. What happened to quality assurance? Did no one seriously step up and say, "This isn't up to the standard we expect"? Where is the team that took XIV 1.0 and turned a trashfire into a successful game worth caring about and subscribing to? Gone, I guess, reassigned to other projects and departments, with no one qualified to take the helm of XIV.

I'm obligated to finish the raid tier with my static, and after that, I'm leaving. Until they SERIOUSLY address the problems with character models and show some actual evidence of fixing the faces and making amends for this insult of an MSQ, I'm done.