Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[YukioKobayashi]

Mostly raiding. This raidtier now is imo the best since edens gate. A raidtier where every fight is at least good.

[ThaCa]

Story and PvP mostly. I used to play most of the content but have been doing it less and less while taking longer breaks lately.

Most of my friends were PvE focused and have quit the game during late Endwalker patches, most of them said they would really love to play but the game currently isn't enjoyable to them. Lots of Stormblood nostalgia.

[TheInsomniac13]

Heared that a lot it apprears gemeplay wise FF14 peaked with Stromblood and is in a constant decline since then.

[caffe_macchiato]

what even holds you in the game? Because my honest answer there is nothing left for me and I am really interested to hear what other people still see in this game.

Final Fantasy XIV is still the best MMO for user-created content, much like Skyrim is for open-world games. Square Enix lets you do things with the FFXIV engine that no other MMO company allows you to do. In WoW, for example, I have to manually play duties or craft and gather. With FFXIV, you don’t, and Square Enix lets you do it. Not to mention the tens of thousands of cosmetics made by other players. You can truly be whatever you want to be in this game. And thanks to Square Enix, many of them are completely free. You actually get more value for $13 a month than you would from Second Life or VRchat. FFXIV isn’t just a game, it’s a developer platform, and Square Enix allowed that to happen.

[Tassene]

My 3rd six-month subscription that expires in August. I won't renew as I will have accomplished what I set out to do and that is to complete A Realm Reborn which I purchased when it was released.

I started in 2010? with beta, bought FFXIV, installed and played the first version of FFXIV for a little while but there wasn't enough "game" to keep me. FFXI started in much the same way, and I just thought to give SE some time to improve XIV, and then I would return.

I forgot about XIV until I was in a game store one day and saw FFIV: A Realm Reborn so I bought it, thinking it was an expansion, intending to pick up where I had left off 2-3 years before.

I forgot about it.

In late 2023, I was looking in my closet for some old game discs to install on my new computer and found A Realm Reborn, still wrapped in its plastic wrap; unopened - yet to be played.

I installed it, went to resub to FFXIV so I could play, and there was no option to resub FFXIV; it was no longer available, just an empty tab where XIV used to be listed. It took me until late December or early January to get resubbed to the game. I never knew that the original version had been cancelled.

I've completed the Main Story (MSQ), a lot of the little side quests, a few of the dungeons and some of the crafting stories. Finishing the Main story was all I was really after. I happened onto a npc outside the Company HQ in Ul'dah that involved a little quest that explained what happened with version 1. One of the movies you can watch on the character screen shows what happened to end version 1.

SE did a good job on the upgrades to the game from what it originally was to what if became. If I had stayed with the game from the onset, and progressed from expansion to expansion, I would probably have maintained a continuous sub, there is just that much content to participate in.

I'll tackle that Qarn place this coming weekend now that it has duty support. I have Goldsmith and Blacksmith leveled now so I can repair my Armour and Accessories after I die a whole lot. Learned that the hard way...

Happy Adventuring

[Casti_EL]

For me, it's my friends - without them, I don't think I'd be playing any longer. Aside from the regular stuff (CE, Roulettes, etc) we like to shake it up a bit with our streamer friend's "Fun-chievement Fridays" where we get up to some crazy stuff from time to time (naked dungeon runs, run dungeon only using two abilities throughout, hunt down sprouts and gift them mounts/minions, etc) - little things like this keep me around.

[Miohazuki]

Honest Question not a Bait post.

I recently had to admit that the potential I saw in the game when I first started to play did not deliver in the later expansions of this game, Side Quests stayed as low effort as they started Dungeons are a linear corridor of pull all and kill it and any interesting Boss gimicks we had in the past were phased out of the game so that only DDR Remains.

The only thing that keeped me in the Game was the story making FF 14 for my basicly a Visual Novel interupted by medicore to bad gameplay.
So when Dawntrail drove the story against the wall my biggest draw to the game endet.

The other think I enjoyed was Jobidentity. I loved leveling them all learning the to play them all and then seeing them all getting more and more Braindead. Yoshida acknowledged the communeties worry about the Homoginazation and sayed it would be adressed... only for 7.2 to drop and proving... the Devs do not give a fuck about Jobs and see High end Raiding as the be all and end all of this game, and I coulden´t care less for it.

In the last view weeks I read a lot of Discords and Forum posts and... Many agree... DT was a shit show of story, Jobs dummer then ever and the majorety of the people I saw do not care for Extream, Savage and Ultimates and lament that jobs get cut down to fit this kind of content. Space Exploration is a shit show on an embaresing scale as it seems, which leaves me with this question to the community...

what even holds you in the game? Because my honest answer there is nothing left for me and I am really interested to hear what other people still see in this game.

My fc and friends keep me in this game .that is reason enough for me

[ForteNightshade]

To be honest? Not very much.

I still enjoy high end raiding, but even that isn't retaining my interest despite how good the tier is. This will be the first two since Creator where I don't have the tier on farm by week 3 (usually week 1-2) simply because I'm playing other games. I poked around with Cosmic Exploration yet the obscene grind is a real put off. Especially when it's not really that engaging. I'll admit, I need to give it more time. So I guess we'll see.

Otherwise, sunken cost has a lot to do with it. I still have friends who play despite their equally dwindling interest (one already all but quit). I've mentioned it here before, but it's strange. I don't hate the game nor am I burned out with it. Heck, I even have fun to a point doing roulettes. At the same time, I'm not remotely drawn to XIV like I used to be. I'm excited to replay BG3 again. I'm even going to do two campaigns at once since a friend wants to co op. I'm looking forward to a nuzlocke challenge I want to start. Not to mention a litany of older games in my backlog. If my PC could handle it, Clair Obscur would be dominating my entire week.

XIV though? I go in spurts where I'll spend 15 hours trying to get through the abyss that was M6S than barely log in for weeks at a time beyond reclears or if someone asks me to do roulettes.

[TheInsomniac13]

To be honest? Not very much.

I still enjoy high end raiding, but even that isn't retaining my interest despite how good the tier is. This will be the first two since Creator where I don't have the tier on farm by week 3 (usually week 1-2) simply because I'm playing other games. I poked around with Cosmic Exploration yet the obscene grind is a real put off. Especially when it's not really that engaging. I'll admit, I need to give it more time. So I guess we'll see.

Otherwise, sunken cost has a lot to do with it. I still have friends who play despite their equally dwindling interest (one already all but quit). I've mentioned it here before, but it's strange. I don't hate the game nor am I burned out with it. Heck, I even have fun to a point doing roulettes. At the same time, I'm not remotely drawn to XIV like I used to be. I'm excited to replay BG3 again. I'm even going to do two campaigns at once since a friend wants to co op. I'm looking forward to a nuzlocke challenge I want to start. Not to mention a litany of older games in my backlog. If my PC could handle it, Clair Obscur would be dominating my entire week.

XIV though? I go in spurts where I'll spend 15 hours trying to get through the abyss that was M6S than barely log in for weeks at a time beyond reclears or if someone asks me to do roulettes.

It is worrying how many people give sunken cost falacy as a reason they still play a game that seems to only spend there time while bearly entertaining them.
As it stands I see FF 14 right now in a similar stat as WoW was a few years ago... they are to comfortable with how the game is going and the only think that woke up Activision Blizard that things went the wrong way with WoW... were a great number of players simply leaving the game.
Which is my main hope right now for the game... if the Developers truly do not see how little players right now are invested in this game. Then they need and big exodus of players to realize it. Then again I know of confirmation biased and happy and well player are not neceserely likely to venerate the Forums so my data may be false and everything is peachy from there stadpoint.
Also I have seen the way many Japanes Buisneses operate they are usually not the ones admiting there leaders making bad calls so if an exodus happens it could also likely spell the end of the game.

[Thurmnmurmn]

I quit the game for about 6 months after DT came out and had 0 intentions of ever coming back (had given away all my gil and everything).
I came back because I legit missed the game and the friends I made in it. I was super burnt out prior to my break but since coming back, I've had a larger range of things to work towards since I missed a couple patches.
Not saying "take breaks" is the answer to all, but it worked for me in this case.