The new director will get praise and respect when he earns it. When he can prove he can help move this game forward and make better changes and abilities than this crap RDM one. Maybe actually balance the jobs, Tanaka downright refused to and only made the "liked" jobs more powerful while giving other jobs the shaft.
When the new director can prove he is better than Tanaka (which shouldn't be hard) He'll earn the respect of anyone that is able to criticize something.
SE stated the new director is working on FFXIV 2.0, and when finished he'll come to FFXI
You do realize Tanaka is notorious for making insanely difficult code right? That its almost impossible to change without screwing something else up. They didn't do many huge changes because they are relaunching FFXIV with new engines, clients, maps, mobs, races(male mithra/female galka) and content overhaul. Even the essential programs are being changed, the only thing staying the same is the characters.
The changes Yoshi-P made were praised by everyone that played more then 80% of the time including the critics. Tanaka can never claim this, his biggest enemies in FFXI and FFXIV are the critics. Yoshi-P removed the stuff that made it complete junk(which Tanaka refused to) and he listens to the community. Something the FFXI development team has yet to prove they even do.
While I agree the OLD FFXI was better than todays we also have to remember Tanaka made the road map we are currently on, he set out the plans for abyssea in the first place, as well as voidwatch. So if right now isn't as good. It is still Tanaka's fault.
Tanaka never listened to what the community wanted and before they removed him from the FFXIV director chair he wasn't even considering making changes, 4-5 months after Yoshi-P took over there were sweeping changes. Ones that actually got the FFXIV community excited and made more people want to play. Before they stopped selling FFXIV to prepare for FFXIV: A Realm Reborn they were GAINING players at a higher rate then FFXI is right now. FFXI is actually losing more players per month then they gain.
The game, when it shutdown a week ago and when it was run by tanaka are a completely different experience. Anyone that has actually played FFXIV from launch to shutdown can tell you that.
Yoshi-P Changed almost everything about the game, but was very limited due to the fact Tanaka's code is terrible. There is no doubt in my mind that if they left Tanaka in charge FFXIV would have been dead 2 years ago. He had 5 years+ to develop that game and still gave us nothing amazing. (The name rapture ring a bell? That was its code-name)
Tanaka never listened to the community, Yoshi-P does. That's the major difference between the FFXI and FFXIV development team. The FFXIV dev team listens, In fact, all of the SUCCESSFUL MMOs in the world, the ones with triple FFXI's population or MORE all listen to, reply to and consider player feedback. All Tanaka ever said is "I'll consider it" or when they said it was a good idea at fan fests it still never made it into the game. What does that tell you?
The core game could NOT change because when they were getting around to it they decided "lets change the entire game, what we're doing isn't working" Whats the point in changing what we currently have when they knew they would only relaunch it anyways with a completely different client and code.
It wasn't just content. The way the jobs were played, the abilities they had, the way the armory system works are all completely different to when Tanaka was in charge. The game play and experience changed dramatically. Playing FFXI since NA launch I can tell you this. Yoshi-P made more real changes to FFXIV in a year then Tanaka made to FFXI in a 10 years. The only thing Tanaka did was add content and the only time it changed dramatically was when abyssea was launched which is terrible content compared to the old FFXI content. (don't even get me started on how stupid the stagger system is. The only decent stagger system is the dynamis one. VW and Abyssea sucks in that respect too. The ONLY thing that should EVER effect drop rate is Treasure Hunter.)
All were changed by Yoshi-p. SO instead of defending a sub-par director, hows about you look into some facts before you actually say something.. Tanaka stopped being good when he came out with Abyssea(if you remember correctly he briefly passed director to someone else after FFXIV was launched) Abyssea, voidwatch, re-releases of Limbus, dynamis, nyzul, salvage, etc... are all Tanaka's doing.
From what people are saying almost everything in A Realm Reborn is different. its BETTER. Due to restrictions they aren't allowed to post screenshots or anything... silly agreements NDA's <.<;