Quote Originally Posted by Riposte View Post
Now this thread isn't about making the game more like FFXI or whatever. It is about design choices developers made that are hurting the game when looking at it from within the context of FFXIV: ARR.
The problem is, that the problems of FF14 are some of its design choices, and those are deeply embedded into the game at this point. Making combat interesting will take months at the very least, making the UI more PC friendly will take months as well, provided SE actually acknowledge these things as problems, which they didn't do in beta, despite feedback being loud and clear. A release date had been set already long ago...

FF14 is essentially a hardcore game, that's what it's good at, but it's alienating players looking for this kind of experience with trying to appeal to people who never touched an MMO before. Shallow combat with boring, bad skill design, streamlined itemization, streamlined quests and events (those are OK with me, but they're streamlined nevertheless), lack of character customization, etc.. On top of that, one of the strong points of the game, which is the fact that it's really trying to tell a story, is buried by the lack of voiceovers in ALL quests, not just the main story line. I think it's safe to say that even players genuinely interested in FF lore will at some point just give up trying to read all the walls of text flying at them.

Finally, not really a design choice, but an economic one: no dedicated EU data center, forcing the whole of EU to play with 200ms latency upwards on NA realms. I consider this decision just plain dumb. It's a slap in the face for FF fans in Europe, especially since SE seem to try to get PvP going in FF14 at some point in the future.