I think a lot of people were initially actually excited for the story including myself, as I think many were looking forward to a fresh story and beginning, and then people just found out after-the-fact that the story wasn't any good whatsoever in their perspective and dropped it pretty quickly, like, people were openly discussing about skipping all the cutscenes and story, especially after the disaster that they saw with the initial post-expansion story.

Like a massive number of people actually gave the expansion a chance, they were just simply woefully disappointed by it, and I think this expansion has just simply opened peoples' minds of the fact that when they are on FFXIV they aren't really playing a video game as much as they are just engaging with an unhealthy algorithm masquerading as a video game.

Like sure, people are still playing, and he number drops on a relative % may not be entirely out of the norm, but for a lot of people this has turned from being their main 'game' to just the game that they come back to when there's nothing better to do, which is also why the game feels so lifeless IMO.