As much as I complain about FFXI I do love the game and indeed intend to play it for a long time to come, FF14 will honestly never lure me into playing it so this is my only SE MMO.
Thought a more positive thread about what we currently like about FFXI, what we hope for in future content and how you would tweak current content was a good idea. Hopefully the new era of communcation is still in operation to some degree, genuine changes to VW I think would show we are still genuinly being listened to now (as we used to be during Aby content). There is a very worrying feeling coming across from the devs lately that they know how much players hate certain things but ultimately that we are pretty much being ignored, as was the way of old.
Anyway, for me I like how there is a lot of current casual content (abyssea) that I can do with a few friends. We should get at least a portion of new content that allows low-man fights for good rewards. Content aimed at 3-5 people, kinda like Nyzul/assault used to be before Aby. I don't think adding new NMs here and there to Abyssea would be a bad idea either, it's nice to have our playground still be viable..even if it becomes less important.
Sometimes I just wanna do easyish stuff for a few hours with some friends and feel rewarded for it, Abyssea was amazing for this.
I like how FFXI has become very PUG friendly lately and I hope that everything they add from now on encourages and builds on that. I don't want to have to be forced into joining a LS to do stuff, mainly because you have to worry about joining one that does events at in your time zone and playing to schedules sucks. People should ofc be able to join shells to do this content to the best but we should not be locked out for not having one. Most players love PuG content and stand around PJ waiting for stuff to go do, more of this.
Big difficult content like VW is a good addition and I enjoy the fights, we do need more of this type of challenging stuff. It's PUG friendly but also encourages linkshells to be built for it as well, which is great. Only problem is the drop system is too low/random, a simple points system for killing the mobs (in addition to the current loot system) and being able to buy the drops from an NPC after...say 40-50 kills of each one would I think make it perfect (ie, 40 kills of Voidwraught to be able to buy it's body from an NPC, 50 Pil kills to be able to do the same etc).
I really hope the devs take on board how much players hate the current basic system. It's just totally horrible for people that do this event over and over not get rewarded, logs and stones are not rewards. The current system is honestly so bad that it gets the point where players simply give up on it..a points system added would give incentive to carry on.
The new merit additions sound very good and I hope we get a lot more additions to it, XP has currently become pretty much useless and it's quite sad. More and more additions to what you can do with merits would be amazing and make sure ther eis always some value in getting XP (from nms/events/merit parties).
Aside from the stuff above I hope we get a lot more new content for 99 as well as expansions/addons (There have been a few small hints of these coming).
I'm happy with tweaks to old content gear but also hope they expand on the events themselves somewhat too, ie. maybe higher tier NMs in sky/sea, new floors for Nyzul, new Limbus additions, more wings for salvage etc
From a recent interview it's obvious everything from now on will be a lot less friendly than what we got with Aby, I think most of us accept that, as long as the new balance is going to be a middle ground of what old FFXI used to be and what Aby gave us. I don't think the playerbase can really survive if they are pushed back to how brutal old events were, Aby changed the playerbase and I think that has to be kept in mind. Trying to time warp back and forgetting Aby existed will I think be a major mistake that will ultimately destroy the game.