>>715919110Well despite the more abrupt turn toward negativity, these issues have been slowly happening for a while now. It's just that in Shadowbringers and Endwalker (just 6.0) the story was really good, so people were more likely to overlook and defend anything going wrong.
Jobs were simplified heavily in Shadowbringers in favor of more challenging fight design for high end content. Tanks and Healers were hit especially hard with this.
Content like an exploratory zone (Bozja and Eureka) was just not in Endwalker at all. Being replaced by Criterion, and Island Sanctuary, which were seemingly designed to be painfully quick to run out of reasons to do.
The patch cycle got way longer, meaning that we'd get bored of what little we got much more often.
Endwalker's relics weren't this meticulous grind that you could do whenever you had a spare moment, instead becoming "Have you got 1500 lesser tomestones? good, here's your weapon"
Mostly what was happening in Shadowbringers was a bunch of new people playing the game, experiencing all it had to offer all at once. Around mid Endwalker, these players ran out of stuff to try, and were only then realizing how little was added every patch.
Prior to that, the community around FFXIV was a lot more positive on the game because it was the underdog. They needed people to think it's the best game ever, so any criticism was shut down as just being a hater and a troll. They prided themselves on this wholesome positive Great Community By The Way (tm).
I think one of the turning points was when the game briefly surpassed WoW in terms of popularity. It showed that they weren't the underdog any more; they can go toe-to-toe with the titan if the devs just made it good enough. So now anything wrong with the game has the chance of causing it to sink below WoW again. Which makes it valid to complain about.