I say this after seeing the failure of Cosmic Exploration, Occult Crescent, and how much we're being drip-fed. We experienced it in Endwalker with how ridiculously easy dungeons and raids were to an extent outside Savage and Ultimate, and now we're back on the cycle yet again.

Let's be honest here: We're going to be waiting until 8.0 to even get fixes, and even then it's not going to change much aside from new bells and whistles, maybe a tiny carrot on a long stick that they're going to beat us with until we get our drop like the Yan in Treasure Maps.

Looking at the content of Dawntrail, I'm pretty sure others have said it plenty of times: The magic is gone after the first few runs of a dungeon. Dungeon content persists for new players, sure, but when it's constantly being re-run after re-run people just accept the grind it is. At the very least, they attempted to fix the problem that they created in Endwalker with dungeons being trivial on arrival and have at least had some success in it(The Strayborough Deadwalk is still one of the best dungeons to date in terms of "Expert" difficulty due to the first boss).

Other than that, it's been a mixed bag from beginning to end. We've yet to see 7.5 sure, but all in all I haven't really seen anything to be surprised about when it comes to encounters except few occasions.

Regardless, outside of that you've got your Trials and Raids. These are more or less what the meat and potatoes are, since you're literally thrown into the fire to do them on Normal - but am I wrong when I say that Extreme and Savage and Ultimate are the only engaging battle content to date if we're not including Exploration Forays?

Because it really feels like it's the only thing that gets people to think about what they're doing half the time and not just pressing one button(not Healers) to do things. That aside, our current Exploration Foray has failed to meet the mark that Bozja left - all because of a failed gameplay loop and horrid systems involved.

Forked Tower was supposed to be engaging content(and it still is, to an extent) for everyone to jump into similar to CLL and Dalriada, or even BA in this regard with the entry system, but it flopped hard before they fixed the problem with pre-mades. There's also the matter that people are heavily discouraged from entering Forked Tower because of its difficulty, even put on a scaler if we also consider how Chaotic went the first few weeks it was out.

The gameplay loop was too repetitive, and didn't give people time to breathe in-between outside of Forked Tower. This is what really made Eureka unique - NMs weren't popping constantly. People had to wait on timers, so they did other things and talked with people while they were waiting. When it comes to Occult Crescent, it's the complete opposite: FATEs spawned constantly, forcing a treadmill you're forced to keep up with even as a player just entering the content, and then missing it either because you lack the Riding Map or because FATE scaling is destroyed by people with Job Mastery nowadays. Relentless Grinds are certainly something for people with a hard grindset, but I don't think that's the case with a majority of XIV players.

This is why Occult Crescent is slowly being abandoned by people because not only are the loot tables a joke when it comes to chests, it rewards you with a majority of junk for your time unless you're doing Forked Tower. They'll grab the one thing they want and then leave - that's it and normally has been the case for a lot of things in XIV.

Now, while Battle Content isn't everything(it really is mostly everything in hindsight), you've got Crafting Content with Cosmic Exploration - where we revisit the Loporrits exploring stars. RABBITS - IN SPAAAAAAACE. It's not a foreign concept given Endwalker, but initially when we first got Cosmic Exploration it was actually kinda cool - though, again after the first few weeks people petered out because not only were your Gatherers starving for GP, Crafters had some recipes that were nigh insurmountable even with BiS, Food, and Pots in the form of EX+. That's still the case today when looking at it through a lens and taking a deeper dive all the way to Oizys.

Phaenna in particular fixed a couple things for Gatherers so they aren't always GP Starved, but it didn't innovate - it just continued with what was building on foreign planets. The only thing that we did unlock was just more colorful scenery, but that's it. That's the reward. Everything else was just the same slop from the Moon with different rewards involved.

Oizys is a continuation of this downtrend, as when we initially started people were excited about the artifact digging since we already knew it was going to be the same old same old. The artifact digging I was hoping to at least have something tangible to hold onto and read, if not for the heck of it or even just a reward tied behind it - instead, it's our favorite trend that they've repackaged from Occult Crescent, it's not spinning the Wheel, it's Lootboxes.

Like seriously? How many times do we have to keep telling you this lesson? LOOTBOXES. ARE. BAD. Especially when you just stuff them with useless stuff that we're just going to sell for paltry gil because we have BETTER THINGS that are being sold in the Credits Store! It's just a slap in the face.

While the Crafting Relic is a grind in itself, my biggest problem is again, systems. Others have said it before, and it's that XIV cannot survive unless they shake this up. Engagement is at an all-time low in content because their systems keep failing to reward the player properly. Their long-form content is failing because of this. If you don't reward the player for their time, they're going to move onto something else and by the time they've exhausted the content(even battle content) they're going to stop playing and probably not come back.

Hell, I'll just come out and say it: The only content keeping XIV alive right now is Player-driven Content. Your RPers, your social events, your clubs? All of those things are driving engagement. It's the ONLY thing driving engagement with others in an MMO that has been disincentivizing actually making connections for content outside of raiding ever since they implemented Duty Support and making it a Single Player Game nearly.

We need the development team to actually give a damn about the content they're putting out because we can't just copy pasta the same systems over and over. That's how you grind out your player base and not make them want to do the new content - because the expectation is it's going to be some form of an old system that was good in the past, but doesn't work today.

Innovate. Break out of the formula and try something new. That's really all I can say as feedback to the dev team from this post outside of highlighting the failures from content and lack of engagement. You can say the same of Healer Engagement too, if you want to go that far and understand why there's a lack of Healers still.

Other than that, Please look forward to 8.0 as Yoshida would say.