Starting off by saying this is opinion. I am not saying this is absolutely going to happen and that I am absolutely right. I'm not trying to start any flames wars or anything of that nature.
Now, I came into FFXIV in the last quarter of ARR and was floored by all the content. I never really ran out of things to do and simply had a blast seeing things and trying new things. It was simply fantastic. And about mid way to the end of ARR is where the game started seeing significant growth and many people saw the same things I did. Lots of stuff to do, lots of neat things.
Going into HW, I was out of stuff to do in about 2 weeks.
I feel as though an issue HW is about to face is that many of its players were expecting mid-end game ARR content levels. In the very least they are used to that. But HW isnt ARR. ARR had time to build. Now going into HW and with the new patch looking to be a little smaller than some of the ARR patches, I feel as though the game is going to start shedding subs in the same way as WoD did: there is nothing to do at the level cap. Many players saw a big raid, they saw many dungeons, and while they understood they were the workings of patches they werent part of the launch of, its hard to keep that in mind when taking part. Its hard to reflect on that when playing an expansion at its start and the content cannot compare in the least with what was seen from a players start of ARR.
Anyone else seeing something similar happening? I've seen the complaint here and there that there's nothing to do, and frankly, I canceled my sub since I don't want to deal with the headache that is savage. My two months of HW were mostly spent grinding my head against dungeons that I found boring after one go, and doing savage normal which, aside from the music, is just bad and monotonous.