Zinato, you make a good, if dangerous point. Honestly, I am not an expert on WoW, but I did give it a shot for a bit, and yes, some of those mechanics I did like. For example, the tutorial was nicely done. The game was very good at explaining where it wants you to go and what to do. And, WoW did have mini-games. I particularly enjoyed the plants vs. zombies minigame and I enjoyed this.. thing where you go shoot at dragons with your dragon.. I don't remember the name for it, it was a repeatable quest. The point is, you get a dragon and you shoot down other dragons. That was kinna fun. Mainly, though, WoW tried to appeal to as many players as possible. The game struck me as something that the developers truly had fun putting together. There was much humor in it, for example, and a lot of fun.

I never got into WoW terribly -- mainly cuz I can't be paying for two MMOs, and I didn't like the community at all -- but yeah, you're right.

In fact, a ton of their proposed changes to XIV seem to be the stuff that WoW has. not that WoW has monopoly on stuff like dungeon finder...but yeah. XIV was too unique in certain aspects (We won't have any classes!) and not unique enough in other aspects (copy-paste terrain, copy-paste races from XI with a different backstory, so it made no sense) but that's neither here nor there.

FFXI's major problem has been -- and remains -- is that it's damn hard to get into. It's unfriendly to new players. It takes too many hoops to start playing it, and that probably turned a ton of people off. They never took a long, hard look at their shortcomings. They never said 'Yeah, the LFG system has sucked for years. Let's go change it.' In fact, they seem downright unwilling to make major changes like that.

That's mainly where I want innovation. I dont' care if they take my ideas, or not. I'm not a game developer. But I would like to see that someone at SE is looking at this game critically and saying 'Here's something new to this game, something we didn't have. Here's events which are designed to be enjoyed by a lot of people. Here's how we plan to attract new people. ' Instead...hell, I've no clue what they're doing instead. Spinning their wheels in the mud, it seems, creatively.