The nerf scattergun approach?

[Runespider]

However, if you say it was good for the game or it increased the subscriptions or some garbage like that I'd like to hear an explanation or to see your sources because it goes completely against what I've experienced.

I can only speak for myself here but just before Abyssea hit I was almost completely burned out with the game, I'd pretty much done everything there was to do and suffered for the doing of it (4+ years of 3 hour dyna runs twice a week bored out of my skull, 3 years of doing kings and being utterly dominated by botters with Square looking on unwilling to combat it, years working on a relic only to finally obtain it and due to balance fears it being so underwhelming it making me laugh in desbelief at spending so much time and effort on it), just hanging around because of time invested and some close friends.

Abyssea came and literally blew me away, not only was there so much new content, not only did I no longer have to find a LS and could do it with friends but it was a total change to the old punishing game we were all so used to. It completely turned the entire game on it's head and it was pretty exciting, once the shock wore off. I've done all the old content (aside from AV/PW) with the shells that I had, I've done all there is to do in Abyssea and in my opinion Abyssea was the best this game has ever been.

Now we are sliding slowly but surely back to old FFXI and honestly I really don't want to go there, it was a horribly punishing, boring and an unrewarding place...the majority of my play time was standing around WG before Aby. The constant stream of nerfs just build on the already bad feeling I have with how the game is going.

So we are just stuck on a game we love and can't turn away from that is slowly being turned into a chamber of horrors of punishing gameplay features again, we can't simply move on because of time invested and a genuine love of it so all we can do is complain and hope they listen...with the honest realisation that in reality, they wont.

If there is a new expansion coming, now is the time to tell us because I don't see anything to look forward to at all, nothing. I'm sure i'm not the only one.

Maybe it's an attempt to make XIVv2 more appealing with XI being a factor to XIVv1 failing but if that really is what is happening I think it will have the total opposite effect, trusting a company to not do the same thing with the new game they are doing with the other? Crapping up a game people love will just cause resentment and in a game that players are expected to put 4-5+ years into trust is a big factor.