If it is not broken, DO NO FIX IT!

[Ablongman]

Again... Ultima Online and Darkfall are both MMORPGs where you can make what ever type of character you want. So this isn't something that only exists in single-player RPGs. If you try to argue if FFXIV is theme park or sand box it's probably supposed to be a theme park mmo... but uhhh I find we are having to make our own fun more than running content from SE so does that make it a sandbox at the moment?

The fact is that freedom to make any character you want means, by necessity, the freedom to mess up your character any way you like. Some choices will always be better than others. True balance is impossible, which would not matter if you did not have a community obsessed with being hardcore and min-maxing.

If character A can bring the debuffs you need, do exceptional damage and survive, why would you bring character B who free-formed it, has the debuff, but does less damage because he chose to allocate stat points to boost his self-healing? The ability to choose is golden, but mix-maxing is all about getting what you need and minimizing redundancy. A build that overlaps with the job of another member of your party is sub-optimal in a hardcore environment, and therefore, less desirable.

Long post short: Free-form is not free when some choices are better than others. And since true balance is impossible, there is always a "right" and a "wrong" way to build your character for endgame content.

Also, to your point about sandbox vs. theme park: this game is not a sandbox, it just sorely lacks meat on the bones. Take RIFT, for instance. 90% of the quest content in that game is glorified grinding. However, the quests justify it, give it a strong purpose, and guide you along a storyline that makes the game feel cohesive and alive.

Sandbox MMO's sound great in theory, until you realize that a lot of the players are not very good at content generation and storytelling. I presume many of us are here because we enjoy FF-style storytelling and gameplay, both of which FFXIV lacks right now.