Originally Posted by
moroarda
I don't know how much else of this post I find truly defensible but this bit... I mean, if you're honestly letting yourself be objective there's more than a kernel of truth in here.
XIV hasn't "stopped being an MMO" but something I've always praised about the game is that the group content is necessary, as compared to something like ESO where you can play the entire game as another standalone TES game and hardly ever interact with another player.
I do see this as a negative, if for no other reason than because it will only serve to further the already massive skill gap we see in the playerbase. There are people basically playing this as a visual novel at this point, and the more people who only engage with combat in a very shallow way the more people who get dumped out of the leveling process at 90 who don't understand even basic fundamentals.
Further allowing people to isolate and not receive help and feedback from other players can only be a bad thing, especially when one of the more or less universally recognized faults in XIV is it's incredibly poor (dare I say nonexistant) direction when it comes to how to play jobs properly.