The people playing serve as free testers to all the changes in the game, wether you like it or not it's just the truth. Shutting the servers down wouldn't help them test content on a scale that having open active servers do. If history has shown us anything is that closed "Lab settings" tend to go awry almost all the time.

Far be it from "Ignoring" these issues but they are not huge issues. Inflation in XI did not cause a "large population decrease" if anything effected the games population is when SE mass banned RMT. Crafting is set to be self-defeating from the get-go, instead of acting on the people who are allready rank 50 "Botted or not" they should try and make the system rewarding at any rank. Botting doesn't compound the issue that the crafting system is easily monopolized. Did XI go ape on crafters who had high lvl crafts before anyone else? Nope, does any game with a level based crafting system? Nope.

RMT didn't cause XI to go into a mostly Rare/ex armour mode, it was the players themselves they clamoured for more attainable armour to be powerfull, they were tired of camping monsters for days to only get nothing to show for it, or see some jerk make a fortune off something they could have used. Rare/ex gear started to become quested because players wanted a system that allowed them to progress towards their items of choice.

My opinion on having crafters as a class on there own is beside the point "I think as it is it's pointless to call them classes, more like skills you need to have a item to use." They need to fix this system before they worry about if it's fair or unfair for people to be rank 50.

People join WoW all the time and people are "in terms of gear" Lightyears ahead of them, people join XI all the time and people are far far ahead of them in terms of progress. having a legacy playerbase doesn't hurt new gamers in the long run. Hell it gives them people to look towards becoming.

Hell when I first started XI I watched a Blackmage cast Freeze on a mandragora, bam I had a goal I wanted to reach to become that powerfull. Perhaps before worrying that a small percentage of the games overall user base will be high level before anyone else. We should worry about making the game fun. Once the game is fun, you can worry about the Economy, easing new players into the game, fighting Botting and RMT, all that fun stuff.

I'm not telling SE to shut down the servers and wipe characters that would be stupid. What I am saying is they need to focus on the big things before looking at the little things.

If you have ever been classed in managment at all there is a term called "Moving all my rocks" You have a table full of rocks this table wont hold these rocks forever, there are rocks of all sizes on the table. To be able to retain the tables integrity for the longest time you generally would worry about moving the larger rocks first as they pose the greatest risk to the table bowing, once you get those rocks moved it's an easy task to move all of the little rocks without worrying about how long you have to get them off the table.

I can't say I put it as elloquinty as I had wished...But I'm sure you get the picture.

Even if Issues like RMT, Bots, and the Economy are issues that compound and get more serious as time rolls by. They are still by far less important issues than some things the developement team has on their plate. I would argue they are putting some things infront of the issues present "Like jumping wtf" But the main battle system and class system in general needs alot of work. Once they do that then I'm sure they will entertain these ideas in good time.

If you don't have faith in SE to do this, I suggest you put down the controler and find a different MMO to play. Because at the end of the day we are putting our faith in SE to fix this game, get it moving forward, and make it a fun game to play. No matter what we think differently we all want the same thing at the end of the day. A fun game.

Our roll is to provide our insight on how we feel the game should develope, posts like this are great for the developers to read over. I'm not saying we shouldn't debate these issues, far from it. I prefer this to someone complaining about patch notes or the patcher while not actually giving a solution. But harping on SE's marketing and PR doesn't help the game much, SE has taken leaps and bounds from where they used to be. Hell sometimes I wish they would just drop updates on us out of the blue and not even tell us half of the changes they made, at least then people wouldn't make 18 complaint threads about patches before they even released or people hype themselves up for invisible "Ultra updates". Look at the forums right now there are 5 threads whining about the lack of content in 1.17b when there was 0 indiciation that there was going to be anything in the patch.

SE clearly would have told us "Hey guys look out something cool is coming this week" but people got all hyped up anyways without any clear indication to do so just because Yoshi said "Maybe" we would get something. I also expect mid-june to be a gong show if they don't give the people 1.18 because Yoshi said thats "Around" when the patch would be coming.

I say they stop even trying to give us information as we don't seem to be able to do anything productive with it most of the time but complain. I digress though because there are a few people who can take the news about new job systems, and Auto attack and form a coherint opinion aside from.

I R HATE AUTO ATTACKS! MASH 1 MOAR PLEASE!

Instead of saying why they feel the current system would be better than the proposed AA sytem, and then we get people going ape about the AA system because they don't have details on how it will work. It's obvious SE wont say anything because nothing is in stone. They could be working in one direction, find out it sucks ass, and go another direction. If they don't tell us specifics they don't need to worry about informing us everytime they make a design change, and having us crap our pants when they do.