I joke about only ERPers being left in this game but honestly the reality isn't that far off if you add in another group: hardcore raiders.
During Heavensward, Stormblood, and so on, it seems that most of the activity is from midcore players, the players who might engage in an extreme trial once in a while, pop into Eureka and banter about pazuzu, maybe someone who's trying their damn hardest in O3S with their static, in week 10 or whatever.
The "clubs have taken over FF14" thing has been done to death and to be honest I don't care at all because it's easy to avoid that scene and they don't really affect the game's direction outside of maybe more "modern" glams/furniture.
So I'd rather focus on the other group, because they are the ones who actually affect game design. Back then there were barely any clubs, but more importantly the "hardcore" folks are a minority. Clearing UCoB is a serious prestige during Stormblood. Those golden weapons and <The Legend> were truly rare.
I think something has gone really wrong in the endgame. I got dragged back to do UMAD with a friend so I decided to try a bit of other content out. I was surprised by how many Necromancers (solo PotD clear) there are now. I see tons of Infamy of Blood's (100 FTB clears). These are just in random alliance roulettes, man. I popped into South Horn and not a day goes by without seeing a Necro, Lone Hero, Epic Hero, Literary Cannon, Infamy of Blood, and recently Cruel Legends... In fact if I had to guess these titles are like 10% of the players in South Horn.
And there are way more people who don't wear those titles but are working towards them. So many people doing the pots fate aren't even doing it for gil but doing it towards a literal insane 2000 pot-chest achievement.
I know, I know, you're gonna say "no one except the hardcore folks are even bothering with South Horn now." But I most DEFINITELY did not see this many Legends/Ultimate Legends in Eureka, even during content drought-era (4.55) Hydatos or any of the Eureka zones.
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Dawntrail has shed players at a pretty alarming rate, but that's not really news. I think what is concerning is what the implications of this is.
I think if you've been here a while, you'd remember that the forums were on fire in 2025. Dissatisfaction was extremely high. If you now go back and look at some of the threads from back then, you'd realize that most of the complainers have not posted after that period. For better or worse, the complainers are pretty much already gone.
What's left in this game and its associated social media (including the forums) are basically no longer representative of the game's population back during ShB/EW. In a sense, getting opinion from whatever group of players is still left playing the game is fruitless if the goal is to attract the players who left back in because clearly they are not providing their feedback anymore. They probably are no longer even paying attention to the game.
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Why do I say this? I happened to see this thread lately:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...public-content
I wasn't playing during FT so I didn't really understand what the fuss was about that I've heard. Now, I legitimately do not care about the FT drama from back then because it's basically solved, so please don't bring up FT drama. What is revealing is why the developers even chose to implement FT that way. And what is concerning is the community's response to the debacle. Look at the likes in that thread. Far more people agreed with the OP than disagreed.
Why it is revealing: because, apparently, Square Enix has explicitly stated that they've learned from the debacle with Baldesion Arsenal. And they NEVERTHELESS designed a raid where you LITERALLY CANNOT CLEAR without coordination. Furthermore, FTB has far worse wipe mechanics than BA and DSR. A lot of DSR wipes are due to attrition and not because one person did something wrong and basically wipes everyone. Meanwhile, in FTB, someone standing at the wrong spot during fire towers can WIPE ALL 48 PEOPLE. Someone with the big marker during axe or stack during lance can WIPE ALL 48 PEOPLE.
Why would they do that if they did not INTEND for FTB to be for hardcore players, in fact at a level probably above that of DSR with how many wipe mechanics there are?
Now look at the achievements in South Horn. 100 FTB clears? DSR achievements stopped at 10 (or 20?). 10,000 chests? 2,000 pots? 2,000 bunnies? Compare this to the Bozjan achievements. The grindiest one from Bozja would probably be Suns of Bozja, but that takes a few weeks (of real time, non-continuous). 2,000 pots take literal years (non-continuous), and that's if you spend hours every day in South/North Horn. Why would they even implement achievements at this level?
And what about the Chaotic raid at the start of this expansion? That's another hardcore encounter where one person could wipe everyone, and once again designed as a DDR-style hardcore raid.
What about Pilgrim's Traverse? They designed another hardcore encounter, this time a 4-player raid, where one person could wipe everyone, once again designed as a DDR-style hardcore raid with a difficulty level equivalent to higher-floor Savages.
Do you see what is happening? More and more resources are going towards ONE SPECIFIC TYPE OF CONTENT: hardcore raids. For one SPECIFIC TYPE OF PLAYER: people who enjoy Ultimate-style DDR raids.
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And looking at who's playing the game, there are more and more unironic achievement hunters. The achievement hunting Discord has ballooned in size. People are really grinding for 2,000 pots and 2,000 bunnies. I saw more <The Accursed> this month than my entire playtime from HW up to when I quit in late EW. That's 20,000 Accursed Hoards FYI (although, of course, I do not know whether they botted it.)
So much of the feedback that actually goes towards the devs are from hardcore raiders too, because the devs ignore basically every social media other than content creators. People like MrHappy, Rinon... these are ALL hardcore raiders. Even if they deny it or pretend that they understand the midcore or casual perspective, they pour hours into the game every single day. They make content around this game. And the fact that they aren't bored of it yet means that they are NOT like the 50% of players who quit since DT launch.
And as the game has shed more and more players, I've noticed that the discourse on social media surrounding this game has bifurcated into two extremes, although they're not really even on the same spectrum. On one side, you have the highly modded clubbing/art scene. On the other, you have the hardcore raider types. The reality is just that a lot of midcore players have already quit, and so the opinion distribution online is now skewed. At this point the forums are probably the last remaining platform where I even see the mythical "midcore" player -- someone who has cleared maybe an Extreme or two, maybe a Savage, but is clearly not collecting all mounts or running FTB 100 times.
IF the developers keep taking feedback from the remaining playerbase, I think this game is going to shed even more players in Evercold. It is very obvious that at this point that the developers have basically reshaped the entire game to cater to hardcore raiders. Jobs are GUTTED because of hardcore raiders, even if hardcore raiders never wanted it (and many truly did not want it.) That's because they wanted the jobs to be simple enough and have enough flexibility (like 1.5s cast times on healers, or the gutted BLM) so they can push ultimate raids to be even more demanding at a mechanical level (imagine doing UMAD on 2.5s cast time healers). But it's also because they want to reduce a specific type of friction (job-induced friction) to funnel the game towards a specific type of vision, a vision of Forked Tower: Blood, Another Aloalo Island (Savage), The Final Verse (Quantum 40), Dancing Mad (Ultimate); of grinding for 1200 hours in South Horn to get a single achievement; of playing braindead jobs in normal mode content because the point of jobs is NOT for YOU to play in alliance raids, but for the HARDCORE PLAYERS to play in Ultimates. And truly if you are midcore you're NOT part of that vision.
I can't believe I'm saying this but the game has become too hardcore for its own good.
This is coming from a Necro + FTB + UMAD clearer FYI, and I vastly prefer the game back when it was squarely centered on the midcore experience.
Continue reading...
During Heavensward, Stormblood, and so on, it seems that most of the activity is from midcore players, the players who might engage in an extreme trial once in a while, pop into Eureka and banter about pazuzu, maybe someone who's trying their damn hardest in O3S with their static, in week 10 or whatever.
The "clubs have taken over FF14" thing has been done to death and to be honest I don't care at all because it's easy to avoid that scene and they don't really affect the game's direction outside of maybe more "modern" glams/furniture.
So I'd rather focus on the other group, because they are the ones who actually affect game design. Back then there were barely any clubs, but more importantly the "hardcore" folks are a minority. Clearing UCoB is a serious prestige during Stormblood. Those golden weapons and <The Legend> were truly rare.
I think something has gone really wrong in the endgame. I got dragged back to do UMAD with a friend so I decided to try a bit of other content out. I was surprised by how many Necromancers (solo PotD clear) there are now. I see tons of Infamy of Blood's (100 FTB clears). These are just in random alliance roulettes, man. I popped into South Horn and not a day goes by without seeing a Necro, Lone Hero, Epic Hero, Literary Cannon, Infamy of Blood, and recently Cruel Legends... In fact if I had to guess these titles are like 10% of the players in South Horn.
And there are way more people who don't wear those titles but are working towards them. So many people doing the pots fate aren't even doing it for gil but doing it towards a literal insane 2000 pot-chest achievement.
I know, I know, you're gonna say "no one except the hardcore folks are even bothering with South Horn now." But I most DEFINITELY did not see this many Legends/Ultimate Legends in Eureka, even during content drought-era (4.55) Hydatos or any of the Eureka zones.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dawntrail has shed players at a pretty alarming rate, but that's not really news. I think what is concerning is what the implications of this is.
I think if you've been here a while, you'd remember that the forums were on fire in 2025. Dissatisfaction was extremely high. If you now go back and look at some of the threads from back then, you'd realize that most of the complainers have not posted after that period. For better or worse, the complainers are pretty much already gone.
What's left in this game and its associated social media (including the forums) are basically no longer representative of the game's population back during ShB/EW. In a sense, getting opinion from whatever group of players is still left playing the game is fruitless if the goal is to attract the players who left back in because clearly they are not providing their feedback anymore. They probably are no longer even paying attention to the game.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why do I say this? I happened to see this thread lately:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...public-content
I wasn't playing during FT so I didn't really understand what the fuss was about that I've heard. Now, I legitimately do not care about the FT drama from back then because it's basically solved, so please don't bring up FT drama. What is revealing is why the developers even chose to implement FT that way. And what is concerning is the community's response to the debacle. Look at the likes in that thread. Far more people agreed with the OP than disagreed.
Why it is revealing: because, apparently, Square Enix has explicitly stated that they've learned from the debacle with Baldesion Arsenal. And they NEVERTHELESS designed a raid where you LITERALLY CANNOT CLEAR without coordination. Furthermore, FTB has far worse wipe mechanics than BA and DSR. A lot of DSR wipes are due to attrition and not because one person did something wrong and basically wipes everyone. Meanwhile, in FTB, someone standing at the wrong spot during fire towers can WIPE ALL 48 PEOPLE. Someone with the big marker during axe or stack during lance can WIPE ALL 48 PEOPLE.
Why would they do that if they did not INTEND for FTB to be for hardcore players, in fact at a level probably above that of DSR with how many wipe mechanics there are?
Now look at the achievements in South Horn. 100 FTB clears? DSR achievements stopped at 10 (or 20?). 10,000 chests? 2,000 pots? 2,000 bunnies? Compare this to the Bozjan achievements. The grindiest one from Bozja would probably be Suns of Bozja, but that takes a few weeks (of real time, non-continuous). 2,000 pots take literal years (non-continuous), and that's if you spend hours every day in South/North Horn. Why would they even implement achievements at this level?
And what about the Chaotic raid at the start of this expansion? That's another hardcore encounter where one person could wipe everyone, and once again designed as a DDR-style hardcore raid.
What about Pilgrim's Traverse? They designed another hardcore encounter, this time a 4-player raid, where one person could wipe everyone, once again designed as a DDR-style hardcore raid with a difficulty level equivalent to higher-floor Savages.
Do you see what is happening? More and more resources are going towards ONE SPECIFIC TYPE OF CONTENT: hardcore raids. For one SPECIFIC TYPE OF PLAYER: people who enjoy Ultimate-style DDR raids.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And looking at who's playing the game, there are more and more unironic achievement hunters. The achievement hunting Discord has ballooned in size. People are really grinding for 2,000 pots and 2,000 bunnies. I saw more <The Accursed> this month than my entire playtime from HW up to when I quit in late EW. That's 20,000 Accursed Hoards FYI (although, of course, I do not know whether they botted it.)
So much of the feedback that actually goes towards the devs are from hardcore raiders too, because the devs ignore basically every social media other than content creators. People like MrHappy, Rinon... these are ALL hardcore raiders. Even if they deny it or pretend that they understand the midcore or casual perspective, they pour hours into the game every single day. They make content around this game. And the fact that they aren't bored of it yet means that they are NOT like the 50% of players who quit since DT launch.
And as the game has shed more and more players, I've noticed that the discourse on social media surrounding this game has bifurcated into two extremes, although they're not really even on the same spectrum. On one side, you have the highly modded clubbing/art scene. On the other, you have the hardcore raider types. The reality is just that a lot of midcore players have already quit, and so the opinion distribution online is now skewed. At this point the forums are probably the last remaining platform where I even see the mythical "midcore" player -- someone who has cleared maybe an Extreme or two, maybe a Savage, but is clearly not collecting all mounts or running FTB 100 times.
IF the developers keep taking feedback from the remaining playerbase, I think this game is going to shed even more players in Evercold. It is very obvious that at this point that the developers have basically reshaped the entire game to cater to hardcore raiders. Jobs are GUTTED because of hardcore raiders, even if hardcore raiders never wanted it (and many truly did not want it.) That's because they wanted the jobs to be simple enough and have enough flexibility (like 1.5s cast times on healers, or the gutted BLM) so they can push ultimate raids to be even more demanding at a mechanical level (imagine doing UMAD on 2.5s cast time healers). But it's also because they want to reduce a specific type of friction (job-induced friction) to funnel the game towards a specific type of vision, a vision of Forked Tower: Blood, Another Aloalo Island (Savage), The Final Verse (Quantum 40), Dancing Mad (Ultimate); of grinding for 1200 hours in South Horn to get a single achievement; of playing braindead jobs in normal mode content because the point of jobs is NOT for YOU to play in alliance raids, but for the HARDCORE PLAYERS to play in Ultimates. And truly if you are midcore you're NOT part of that vision.
I can't believe I'm saying this but the game has become too hardcore for its own good.
This is coming from a Necro + FTB + UMAD clearer FYI, and I vastly prefer the game back when it was squarely centered on the midcore experience.
Continue reading...