>>719695097
>that tier caused multiple raid statics to implode and caused people to give up on the game entirely and unsub.
I already addressed this. Nobody was raiding in ARR/HW. If you did, you were in an unfathomably slim minority of players as fucking is, especially if you were raiding in NA.

https://fashionninjutsu.com/2016/08/31/the-state-of-raiding-in-ffxiv-part-one-some-numbers/

Here's an ancient ass source for semi-accurate numbers for that era if you're genuinely curious. 5% of the playerbase was raiding in ARR, and its calculated at about 2% of the overall playerbase (assuming these numbers are all accurate) were raiding in HW. This is already an absurdly thin slice of players we're discussing here. I think to argue over Gordias as a raiding death knell, the game would have had to fucking HAVE a raiding scene at all in the first place. 5% overall, when we both know that selling clears was fucking notoriously common in ARR, is the equivalent of our currently anemic Ultimate scene. Strictly speaking, raiding was not popular with the vast majority of players during that era of the game in the first place. I've never done a serious deep dive, but I'd say raiding didn't start to get really popular until O1~O4. Creator had like 8 minute queue times in fucking normal mode, man.

Image attached is from Lucky Bancho's 16/1/9 census, located here: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/46515415.html