Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Amarande]

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

It's definitely gone in that direction and I'm not 100% sure why.

As I have noted before I tend to keep coming back to the thought that either it's because the Endwalker launch disaster has induced them to try to focus on a more specific audience (Stormblood was def an everyone's game, Shadowbringers started out that way but the evolution was stunted by Covid, Endwalker launch showed "oops servers can't really handle being everyone's game") or because Blizzard is more aggressively currying the casual endgame playerbase (especially with the simplification coming with Midnight through the revocation of combat addons etc) and for 20 years now the MMO industry lesson has been "don't go straight up head-to-head with WoW, just don't" (I mean look at how SWTOR and LOTRO have both faded into niche status, despite having two of the literally most iconic geekly licenses there are).

If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

Not just raiding content creators, consider overall raiding community - while there are places like these forums and Reddit, "the community" tends to center around Discord and there are two things that one finds quickly in virtually all visible raiding Discords: Moderation is designed to actively marginalize the voice of anyone who isn't either hardcore or aspiring hardcore (others are labeled as either misinformed or "bad and don't want to improve" or other excuses to discredit and those who don't fall in line or quiet themselves are banned/muted), and forum format communities are actively dunked on with a "don't listen to them" admonition.

Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

100%, this 100%. It's been the case in places since Shadowbringers actually and it's not just Alliance raids. Compare ShB Extremes and Savage to Stormblood ones for instance, in StB you almost always saw all the relevant mechanics by "halftime" (relative to enrage) and after was mainly repeats and remixes with often the final 30-60 seconds being simple raidwide spam allowing you to lock in for that last DPS push, while in ShB you got fun things like Cycles and Black Smokers to punish you for getting that far and make it far less likely you'd pull it out.

It's like they realized Skip Soar or Disband was bad when they made Stormblood and then backpedaled on it (and almost EVERYTHING that made Stormblood super chill and cool) in the later xpacs (even ShB and EW where we were still riding high and the rot was less front and center) ...