Genuinely, What am I missing?

[kajv95]

Welcome to the game and the forums! It's good to see you've been enjoying yourself.

The thing with the state of the forums and chunks of the playerbase is that there's multiple things coalescing in one big depression pile right now.

I'll try to keep every aspect brief, but hopefully enough to have you up to speed as to why things are the way they are around here.

1. The Story "Ended", and the next chapter feels lacking.
Endwalker was already a bit of a... let's say, controversial ending to the story. All throughout A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers, they've been building up more and more lore. Such as "The Twelve", which is directly related to 1.0 for example, getting a "who they are and where they're going" conclusion that for a lot of people, including myself, felt extremely disappointing. I don't want to spoil things, of course, but as they effectively crammed two expansion stories into one, it feels like specific things did not get the time to breathe at all, resolved almost entirely offscreen, and since they're now for the most part "resolved", it feels like that part of the journey was just entirely wasted. The patches for Endwalker then focused on a new character, which was basically just a line of sidequests before very hastily going "oh, right, Dawntrail needs to start" in the very last set of patches.

With this, the writing was on the wall, but a lot of us were still more than ready to give Dawntrail a shot, and what we got was... well, I won't speak for everyone - just myself - but what we got was boring, out of character tripe where the entire story falls flat on its face because if you stop for one second during every action setpiece and think about it, just a little more thoroughly... nothing matters. The story would've effectively resolved itself if our character hadn't gotten involved. Couple that with getting paired with a single character nigh-constantly and you get a recipe for disaster, because if you don't like the character... tough shit. Imagine for a minute you didn't like Haurchefant, but the plot basically bends over itself constantly to constantly make him the most effective character in every situation and his screentime was constant. That's basically explaining how Dawntrail feels. Again, some like that character, and so they probably enjoyed the story a lot more! But for others, the story went from a highlight to a consistent feeling of dread of knowing exactly what's going to happen. That's Wuk Lamat.

2. Gameplay reduction
This is where "reminiscing about the glory days" mostly comes in. the short of it is, back in the day, we actually had multiple jobs that played largely differently. I see your main class is set to White Mage. White Mage actually used to have two damage over times instead of just the one, and Astrologian wasn't basically the same job as it! And I see you also play Black Mage. I'm not super familiar with Black Mage myself, but you know those upkeep timers you have on that class? That's gonna be gone soon. "To make it less stressful."
This has been a gradual shift, where the jobs become more and more similar to one another, with more job-specific traits being taken away. Now, you can easily be good with any job, but it comes at the cost of... well, feeling satisfied with that result, really. Personal satisfaction is no longer the endgoal, it's now just routine work.
To put it into perspective, when I first started playing, Bards were practically essential. Lucid Dreaming wasn't a given on any caster, and for long fights, their MP wasn't self-sufficient by design. So a bard had to come around, play the MP regen song which shared their MP with the rest of the party, and keep everyone going. There was also TP, which was basically physical attack MP. It was different, but moreover, it felt like everyone had a role to play.
Now, that role to play has largely been put in the encounter design. People in green go there, people in blue stand here, people in red do this and that - but it starts and ends with encounter design, the jobs themselves never play a part anymore. This has been a gradual shift in the way the game is played, and it feels like it's largely a game now where the focus is on making bigger, flashier attacks, rather than an actual, more fulfilling gameplay experience.
To put this shift in game design into perspective, I want you to know that the developers had no qualms whatsoever about making Bard's songs *not buff the party* anymore in Shadowbringers, which is frankly an insane direction to take in both the job's in-universe lore and the fact that people had been playing bard with buffs for upwards several expansions by that point.

3. Not enough content/Content being stale
I'm combining these into one section because I think they feed into one another pretty well.
So basically, in Shadowbringers, they slowed development down a bit because of factors. That's all fine and good, and stuff happens, you know?
But also, cuts were being made. Per-patch dungeon cadence went from 2 to 1, job quests were getting too much apparently, so they were turned into role quests instead, which... yknow, opinions are mixed on.
Stormblood also had Eureka, which was a new thing, and was massively complained about, but after the developers took criticism into account a lot of us, including myself, enjoyed the later zones. Then Bozja did it again, which I personally wasn't too into, but I know a lot enjoyed that. Endwalker cut that completely, and instead gave us... Island Sanctuary! Which was basically a worse version of the gathering we already had in the game coupled with a spreadsheet simulator. Some enjoyed it, others didn't. It was pretty easy to get into though, and it basically played itself. But it playing itself meant... there wasn't really anything to actually do on it.
With no more optional patch dungeons, and then in Endwalker all the trials being tied to the plot, it meant that when you were done with MSQ, that was... kinda it for each patch? There was no more massive zone to do your relic grind in, instead you just put in those tomestones you've been getting from doing the single dungeon. The alliance raids weren't up to people's enjoyment either.
For Dawntrail, it was basically marketed as "we're getting better! Look at all the stuff we're bringing back!" but the more we're finally seeing in the live letters, the more it seems to be doing the same things we've seen before. It all feels samey now. The dungeons are exactly what you expect, the tribe quests are exactly what you expect, the exploratory zone just looks like another Eureka that's centered all around farming FATEs which is what most people who are into that type of stuff *have been doing already*, the cosmic exploration thing in the live letter was mostly just hitting rocks, sometimes in a mech. And it's more spaced out than eeeeever before. Like, Heaven on High and the second map of Eureka (out of 4!) launched in the same patch series, but now they're saying that for the new thing, they can't do more than two maps because they're also working on the Deep Dungeon (which is what Heaven on High is). It's making a lot of us do a double take and go "wait, huh?"
And don't get me wrong, I don't advocate the developers overworking, but... that's what the increased time between patches was supposed to be for. Not making the patches also have less content.

4. How all this ties into the comparisons to XIV 1.0 and the fear of WoW
The comparisons being made to XIV 1.0 aren't so much towards the game itself as of right now, but towards what appears to be the mindset of the developer. There's a GDC talk with Naoki Yoshida, Yoshi-P, about the mindset going into XIV 1.0 and the mindset he had in creating 2.0, learning from the mistakes that were made in 1.0. The mistakes basically come down to complacency; a Square Enix that, still hot off the heels of the massive success that was Final Fantasy XI, its prior MMO, decided that they just needed to do the same thing but with prettier graphics. But in doing so, they weren't taking into account how the game industry had changed over the last 8 years. The last console generation. Now, we're still on a Heavensward release model, an expansion that launched nearly 10 years ago now, and nothing has changed... but the industry once again very much has changed. More and more games are MMOlike in terms of how much they want your attention, and how much they want you to have them as their main game. Final Fantasy XIV has not adapted to this in the slightest, because they were still massively successful. But with the success, that was inherently moreso "the number 1 is faltering and people are flooding to the number 2", the team at SE did not lock in and decide to go all in to retain these players, instead feeling like they can just coast by as they've been doing. Hence, the game feels stagnating. The flood of players is all but gone, returned to WoW, and the danger is that this time, they may take an already annoyed playerbase in XIV with them. And WoW has since learned to adapt. They saw the failing and the exodus, and they started working to retain current players and get their old players back. What's more though, they seem to have decided to strike at the heart of XIV, finally working on actual player housing, making jabs at the housing situation as it is on XIV currently, and arguably having the potential to do it much better. They introduced warbands so that playing multiple characters is very close to playing multiple jobs on here, working on making a more solo-able experience and they've even decided to put narrative further to the front with a 3-expansion long saga. On top of that, they've committed to trying to speed up the content cadence without trying to lose the content they already have. At this point, I fully expect some kind of catboy/girl race to start existing in Azeroth to attempt to get even more players over so that they can keep playing their catpeople in a game that feels more alive.

5. Yoshi-P and Controversy.
No, Yoshi is not a controversial person in the sense he did something. It's more the opposite, he's starting to face some disdain from a section of the playerbase for not reacting to... just about anything. For example, Final Fantasy XIV has had a bit of a stalker problem for a while. It's not entirely his fault of course, you can't necessarily control the actions of the playerbase, but there's some completely offkey things like how the friends list, for example, only removes people one way. "So as to not hurt their feelings." And when they finally made a step to alleviate the issue by making blacklisting blacklist an entire service account, they did it in the worst way possible. They did it by broadcasting the player's unique account identifier to the client. This means that with a liiiittle bit of tinkering, you can basically make a stalker database that tracks everyone's character name to the player, and it's remarkably easy to do so. Whoopsies? The initial response to this? Weeks of silence, before finally saying that they will... ask the players using this to please stop. Wow! After that, they finally admitted defeat in a live letter, and did mention that they're going to implement better security. We didn't hear about it in the last live letter, and honestly, it's been months now. The database is likely extremely comprehensive. They waited far too long. And I haven't logged into my alts to stay off the stalker database, so I can't even enjoy *that* part of the game right now. Whiiiiich sucks!

There's also the other shenanigans, such as Viera hats which "weren't possible" and one solo person made it possible on PC. In fact, that one solo person very quickly updates *every new incompatible hat to be compatible.* It's been since Shadowbringers launch since this issue would've been worked on, and not even a major graphics overhaul is enough for the devs to make some more work.

These are but *some* of the things that have slowly been grinding away at players. Each of them on their own can be considered a minor nitpick, or even only relevant to a certain subset of players, but with every few months, the list seems to grow larger and larger, things do not get addressed for years, players are feeling lied to.

My Own Recent Experience
For my own anecdotal contribution to this massive tangent, I was talking to a friend the other day who wanted me to get back on because we never finished grinding all the endwalker mounts, so there's still content for me to do. But the thing is... I didn't buy Dawntrail to play more Endwalker. I bought Dawntrail to play Dawntrail. And there's not been any Dawntrail to play. That sucks! I played Endwalker for years already. I want to sink my teeth into something new, and I did pay both for the new expansion and my subscription, you know? At this point, resubbing for patches is just... paying my subscription, because they carefully space out all the content to be a month away from each other, leading to playing for a day, realising I've wasted my money because I could've finally bought Red Dead Redemption 2 and played that instead, and feeling stupid for it.

That's not to say the journey wasn't enjoyable up to a certain point, but I've been caught up with the game since before Stormblood released, and honestly, sometimes I wish I was a newcomer to the game now, because I feel jealous of you being able to enjoy all of this, continuously, without months of waiting. Without 4 months inbetween story chapters. After all this, I will still genuinely advise you to just... stay off the forums. For now. Find some people who don't complain about the state of the game instead, and go have fun! I reckon it's probably best to only get so deeply involved with all of this once you're all caught up. Have a good time! Form your own opinion on the story. But also, don't feel like you owe anything to the game. Dip once you're no longer feeling like you're enjoying it. You'll inevitably reach that point you had with MTG where it feels like the devs don't care about you, but right now... you're a new player. But, if you're put off by the fact that eventually, the devs will see you as someone they don't need to care to retain, then... Yeah. I'm sorry, but unfortunately that just appears to be the case with a lot of long, on-going games. I hate it too

In closing, there is, of course, far more to say, such as what Gurgeh above me has to say about the community changes as well, but I genuinely hope this long tangent of mine helps you understand why things are the way they are right now.