Disappointed With XIV Direction

[Quuoooote]

I don't want to come off as completely doomer about it, but it seems clear to me that XIV is effectively entering its maintenance mode. People seem to be expecting some sort of signpost or announcement, maybe even an expansion with heavily reduced content to mark the beginning of a hypothetical maintenance era, but the reality is that easing the players into it like boiling frogs is better for business.

A forward-thinking development team wouldn't be going back to ARR to future-proof their game with Duty Support, so that players looking to experience the story can still progress through the game even when queues are dead. Or expending so many resources to freshen up all the old visuals for new players, with minimal benefit for existing players that are metaphorically bleeding out at endgame. Granted, I do not think these changes and additions to the game are bad in a vacuum, but it does give us insight into SE's priorities when existing, long-time players are practically begging for more content and the development time and energy goes to ten-year old, optional dungeons instead so that NPCs can run them. The development team is clearly more interested in chasing churn rates, and my tinfoil hat tells me that may also play a role in job design being so smoothed-out. It's much easier to keep the new players invested when they have zero pain points in their gameplay; the older players will just suck it up and take it. Not to mention the fact that simplified rotations make it much easier to maintain jobs/balance with minimal effort on the development team's part.

As an aside, I hope people in general are able to move past this "casual vs. hardcore" dichotomy to recognize that content is being stretched thin for everyone, and infighting over who has it better is reductive. At this point in the game's lifespan Savage tiers are nearly a full year apart. The new Ultimate is releasing five whole months after the Savage tier. Raiding content innately has more longevity than casual content and has an advantage in that sense, but the cadence of content still leaves an unacceptable amount of dead time. We need field content, we need relics (with actual grind attached), we need something that can tide over the entire general playerbase if we're all going to be stuck in the same boat waiting for months until the next patch.