Vertical progression is awful. SE forced themselves to have to produce new content quickly because of their choice to increase iLvl every few months - basically killing everything that was created before. They added incentive to go back and do irrelevant content by adding it to relic quests and roulettes. Many people worked on relics so that seemed to have worked. But I don't think it was very fun.

One of the best aspects of this game is the fact we can play multiple jobs on one character. But with all the gating, we are forced to always only pick one job to work on at a time. People always argue that if there wasn't gating, people would get all their gear too quickly, get bored and unsub until next patch. HA! People do that now with all the gating! The game just doesn't have enough relevant content to keep people busy when all the gating exists.

I know that this is my opinion and I may be in the minority. But I would like to hope that my opinion matters to SE since I have been a continuous subscription payer to SE since 2006, and have been continuosly supporting FFXIV since the beginning.

Like people in posts above me, I have seen FC's just die. When 2.0 came out, our small FC had two statics. But since December of 2014, only two out of 16 people continued to play. The other FC's that we were friends with had the same thing happen.

I will continue to play because even as boring as this game is, it is still better than playing solitaire. I guess I am looking forward to 2 "new" dungeons, 24 -man content and a primal or two. :/

And omg why is there still a character limit! lol