[ Unlock Aether Servers ]

[Veritas-Ancora]

"It's a patch lull" is intellectually dishonest. Or perhaps bankrupt, and you know it.
The decline has been happening far longer than the last several weeks.

I agree with this. Dawntrail has been a very disappointing expansion for many people. Developers seem to be "throwing s**t and seeing what sticks" as it were. Promise Cosmic Exploration, promise Exploratory Mission (Occult Crescent), promise a Deep Dungeon (Pilgrim's Traverse), keep throwing things at the problem and see what solves it. Unfortunately, I don't see Pilgrim's Traverse to be useful nor do I think players really appreciate a half-arsed Occult Crescent with oopsie patches to fix glaring errors in logic and playerbase.

While we can argue the world as to what will fix this game (and I think the forums do an exceptional job at talking things to death), the current trajectory of an unremarkable storyline, joyless characters, lacking engaging casual content, forgotten housing issues, congested servers (read: no new players), unfulfilling healer rotations, repetitive daily tasks with minimal benefit/reward, forgetting that Ultimate/Savage players are a very small percentage of the player base, and so much more attributes to a game that players are giving up on.

Players begin playing less, or perhaps even quit due to the inability to find others to do things with.
The remaining players, in turn, feel this effect even more pronounced due to dwindling numbers, as now there are even less.
This goes back to point one.

This. EVERYTHING. THIS.

Look, Square-Enix, if you're reading this: all of my closest friends have quit this game. People I considered to be my family are gone. I spent 10 years playing with these people and they silently unsubscribed because they felt bad about leaving, sometimes leaving me a Discord message telling me how much they're going to miss us. One by one, all of my favorite players left. The ones who have stuck around say nothing in chat, have no new players to help guide to L100, have lost interest in signing in more than once a week, and keep hoping for people to come back.

They're. Not. Coming. Back. Unless. You. Do. Something!

The best advice I can give you is to begin scrapping what you're doing and focus on the casual player experience. You have to work extra hard to bring those players back. They didn't find enough enjoyment in the game and you have to do something radical to change that. Work on instance housing. Incentivize players more for doing maps. Create an in-game FC calendar to sign people up for things. Increase the rewards for doing FATEs and Bi-Colored gemstones. Heck, totally revamp the method of receiving tomestones every week so players have more ways of reaching cap. What about Gold Saucer events that don't require 20 minutes waiting time in-between each game?

Above all things, fix the @#$% Datacenter!