Originally Posted by
draugril
I maintain a subscription to both.
When I started playing around in this genre, I had a surplus of time and very little money. Twenty years later, I have the opposite situation - a surplus of money, but very little free time. WoW does that core gameplay loop that originally hooked me better than anything else, and anything that came before. Unfortunately, that's all they do. Every system implemented is in service of chasing a higher number. Even the geography of the world itself is informed by the needs of the gameplay systems rather than systems being designed to suit the world. They have become so laser-focused on that endgame gameplay loop that they have excluded all else. And unfortunately... I literally cannot organize my time in such a way that I can engage in that loop to my satisfaction. Worse yet is that, with scant drops and more RNG, I will often spend time in game that goes entirely unrewarded. WoW does not respect my time.
FFXIV does respect my time, however. And unfortunately, this is an outcome of its admittedly meagre endgame. You can focus elsewhere, and indeed, content 'elsewhere" actually exists. Even if FFXIV were to shift around its resources to match WoW... I wouldn't want it to. It would no longer be a game that I could feasibly enjoy. It serves a different audience from WoW. It has its own niche. And that's okay. It doesn't make it a bad game, no more than WoW no longer suiting my changing lifestyle makes WoW a bad game.
They're different. And that's a good thing.