I've been playing this game for close to 9 years and finally seem to be at the point where I'm struggling to find reasons to keep putting crysta in or even log on for an hour each night. Even a skillup session on GEO seems like a futile effort.

What really triggered this was finally successfully soloing Hedjedjet and getting absolutely nothing for 60 minutes of Avatar kiting, Not even a Card of Ardor. It really seems Mr. Matsui really is trying his hardest to kill off interest in XI by making the game the dojo from hell that actively tries to break the spirits of those who enter. Non-hardcore players need not apply, if you will.

Over the last week or so, I've been playing Guild Wars 2 on the Mac side of my laptop and I get the feeling that ArenaNet got things right where S-E missed the target badly. It seems ANet's philosophy from the jump was to make the game challenging but not unforgiving. Even after only a short period of time, I got the sense that that game wasn't trying to replicate an Ironman Triathlon or some other hardcore activity that excluded a high percentage of its customers.

If they haven't already, S-E would do well to take some pointers for ArenaNet as far as designing FFXIV 2.0 updates in the future.