Originally Posted by
Restonance
I mean, yes that's definitely a big part of it, but it also isn't the only thing. There's one massive problem that I feel like a lot of people overlook when talking about content design.
It's the fact this game is marketed as a story game instead of an MMO.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. FF 14 is trying it's absolute hardest to remove the mmo in mmorpg. This is pure guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was because of the abundance of hikikomori over in Japan. It caters to the people who who have a panic attack when trying to order a pizza over the phone. Working with that type of audience in mind is going to make the experience worse for everybody else. They are trying to convert an mmo into a single player game, thus making both the story and mmo part suffer. It is impossible to win with this design philosophy. They are polar opposite genres and it just doesn't work. SE is stuck trying to future proof a game in a genre that is literally impossible to future proof. The game will shut down eventually. It won't be soon. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this game pulls a WoW and survives another 10 years. You need to connect to servers in order to access the single player content they're so desperately trying to make. Servers have a cost and eventually the income will be insufficient for server upkeep. There goes your efforts of trying to future proof this game and in that time you're ruined the fun content for everyone else.
It's an online game masquerading as a single player one. It doesn't work and the content suffers because of set in stone design philosophies. There's also the blatant disdain for anyone interested in something more challenging than erp or normal trials. Both from the community and Yoshi-P himself.