WoW gave up on the journey and decided to just plop you at endgame with almost zero work.
At least, if you wanted to, you could do the optional old content in XIV with a reasonably good experience. You could do the Level 50, 60, 70 raids. They will be slightly easier, but you still get to do them in a meaningful way that you experience (most of) the mechanics of the fights and everything isn’t two shot.
You can go into optional dungeons, and actually do said dungeons with an auto match-made group (like all content except for Bahamut, Savage and Ultimate) and experience it, as it was in the day.
In WoW? You get a scant few hours to experience 1 expansion of your choice, and even then, you outlevel it even with Chromie Time, before you even get out of one zone. I took a DH to Northrend with CT on, and… well, she’s almost fully leveled, and I did 1 zone (Sholazar Basin).
Weird. I did some of them as WHM myself and I had no trouble?
Because they are awesome transmogs unlike a lot of gear in WoW, lol. Oh, and you know, the raids themselves are fun. And they give you lots of Tomestones. Oh, and the tokens to upgrade tomestone gear.
If you’re an established player, awesome. If you’re a nobody with a 0 raider-io? pfft. Nobody cares about you. You have to please the masses to get invites.
Well, the queues and the fact they had to temporarily disable sales of the game because of newcomers flooding in is hard evidence that a lot of people seem to think XIV is the place to be. If only WoW had that kind of energy, and players loving it so much, eh?
I can’t say that I’ve ever heard, in the last 5+ years, anybody saying “WOW IS AWESOME, COME PLAY WOW!” We’re all just sorta… here… trudging along the treadmill.
If you had played XIV recently, the majority of players adore the game, Yoshi-P, etc. The Cities are filled with players chillin’ and anytime talk about the game comes up, it’s almost always positive (except for the housing system). You go to discord channels, more people going “Yaaaay!” every time new content comes out. Ever seen the plethora of Shadowbringers react to videos on Youtube? They have high like-to-dislike ratios, and the streamers themselves are extremely happy and love the story.
EDIT: Also, Novice Network. My alt is still in there due to her having the Returner status as I had taken a break on her, and NN is always filled with newbies in awe and wonder, gushing about how awesome of an experience they’re having far more often than you hear any kind of complaint against the game. I think I’ve seen one newbie saying he didn’t care about the story (he was a former WoW player lol) while the other newbies were like “Everyone told me ARR is bad, but it’s actually kind of cool!” type stuff.
I remember back at the end of BfA, I checked some of Blizz’s videos of their in-game trailers… they get ratio’d hard, like 70%+ dislikes.
