I was noticing that before I hopped off somewhere in mid-summer. I had started playing GNB simply to make the damn things go faster, because playing BLM was asking for single-pulling tanks and even displaying that warrior can solo almost everything in the game wasn't enough to move curebots (or freestylers) to using their aoe skills. Healing is just asking for the worst combination of everything, even if Sage was kindof fun.
There's like, communities where people are "validated" on their "playstyle choices." Like, entire groups on social media and discords that basically just ass-pat single pulling tanks, no-damage healers, and freestyle DPS who are "too anxious" to learn to play the class at a basic level. And look, I hate meta shit - I hate the obsession with it and people who take games too seriously, which has ruined plenty of online games I enjoyed. But there's one or two ways to play most classes at all in FF14, and not a lot of variety at all to the dungeon content in terms of how you actually play those classes - they're choosing, actively, to be completely useless rather than contribute.
But they're the ones least likely to ever unsub - my friends hopped off the game, I got a little bored, and I just moved on to something else. The "tanxiety" folks are always, always subbed. People like me - who feel that sense of communal effort and don't want to let anyone down by severely underperforming - hop off because there's no sense of communal anything: it's deadass genuinely easier to chat to randoms at a bar counter about politics in India than it is to talk to the average FF14 player about literally anything that isn't anime or coomer shit.
