When Heavensward was releasing I was thinking a lot that it felt like another content patch, just with more stuff, as there were not real qualitative changes, just quantitative - well not right away, anyway. The biggest additions were all the new side content and in DoH/DoL area, while regular content actually became less than it was.
Stormblood coming up... feels exactly the same. Another content patch, now with promise of even less stuff. Most of it has to do with the direction of the game really. Lately I've been playing WoW... a lot of it, actually, and I see a lot of systems that could be easily adapted to improve the endgame if they so wanted. Both games still have a lot to learn from each other. But instead, they focus on housing, which is a weird feature that's to me can't carry an MMORPG at all (and handling of Shirogane is awful, just letting everyone move with hindrances, what a joke) and for swimming they outright say that there's basically no content there, it's just a marketing bullet point.
Somebody suggested that in Japan, the game is actually perceived as being a bit too hardcore. WoW isn't really a big thing over there, and when most fansites for other online games are dedicated to characters, worlds, just overall fun casual stuff, for XIV fansites are basically all mechanics, diagrams, you know, raid stuff. Japanese players that are into XIV have adapted to challenges of the game pretty well actually, but that might not be the image SE wants for the game, since you know, raids and coordination is scary, we just all wanna be social and play dressup, and games telling players they need to get better just aren't in right now!
And really I just want good PVE. Cool, decently challenging and rewarding raids, more interesting content to do with light parties. PotD was okay, but it needed more mechanics and the way to get into hard mode still is inane. Diadem was and still is garbage and I couldn't even enjoy their "new raid content" because during four hours I've spent in there, Emergency Mission not spawned even once.
Hell I'd be into PVP on the side if it was good.
And they're so slow about fixing obvious problems. How about making Frontlines scalable? Oh, it took them 2 and a half years just to remove GC lock that was clogging the queues... How about making FATEs useful to people at level cap? Other than random relic grinds. How about making said relic actually be useful for content instead of pretending it is content unto its own? On that matter, why is crafting such a piece of shit? It seems enchanting for a new player, all those systems and rotations and stuff to do, but at the end, nobody's making stuff for other players, everybody's making things for vendors - you can't level well without leves so leveling items go into vendors, at the cap you're trading in collectibles so that's more vendoring, and why are consumables just as hard to make as gear, what sense does that make?
Nah, we'll just do the same thing we've always did and release a bunch of easy content that gets invalidated within months, if not on release, because by now we've cultivated a playerbase that would riot if devs don't drop pretty dresses out of the sky onto them. I don't get it.
