Forcing us to the entire story quest to unlock the new classes is just bad business

[Reinha]

I'm willing to be that none of you have any idea what the particulars of SE's business model is (especially regarding FFXIV), so most people using the "this is bad business" line are talking out of their ass . . . Hell, if all SE wanted to do is attract the maximum number of players they could, this would be an ad-based free-to-play game on IOS and Android. . . . Game design is mostly not about simply attracting the widest audience you can. It's much more about attracting your target audience effectively

I was going to post something long but this entire post pretty much sums up my thoughts. "Bad for business" is nothing but an unproven claim that's used to make one look like they know what they are talking about. According to SE's briefing slides (http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ne...15q4slides.pdf), their MMO games are making net profit and are referred to as "stable revenue" for them. Ever since the release of ARR their quarterly MMO sales have more than doubled, so it's fair to assume that FFXIV contributes to those net profits. If this game is making a profit for SE, what makes it's current form bad for business?

The fact that some individual new players choose to stop playing, or that you can't get your friends to play a certain game simply isn't enough to prove what's bad business or game design. It's just anecdotal evidence. You're going to have to come up with something better to prove that claim, like statistics and financial data combined with an official definition of "bad business". It's also not the job of the defending side to prove what's "good business", because they aren't the ones who made the original claim. Burden of proof is always on the maker of the claim. Otherwise they are using a logical fallacy called "argument from ignorance" to support their case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Argument from ignorance (Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance stands for "lack of evidence to the contrary"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa). . . . In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used in an attempt to shift the burden of proof.

[Tuathaa]

If this game is making a profit for SE, what makes it's current form bad for business?

Current profit or short term profit is a bit different than steady or continued profit.