Well, yes i guess i should go do some garbage diving then...because IMO that was the MMO with biggest potential i saw in years and the FFXI playerbase messed it up. While people always talk about the bad release and all that s#!t, no one actually gave time for it to develop. Yes, it was a premature and terrible release...but if wasn't the butthurt of FFXI playerbase i bet the original game would be MUCH bettter than the current one.
And now we have a copy/paste of FFXI, a halfdead MMO...and the thing is...those who maintain the MMOs are the casual players, not the HC ones and this "everything for HCs and let the leftovers to the casuals" would just speed up this game's death. Tanaka took a few years to learn this in FFXI and, when he did, FFXI finally became a pleasant game (ToAU+). He brought all the concepts regarding FFXI flaws to this game but actually had no time to pollish them...and now the dev team is putting every concept he brought down...one by one...because i believe that Yoshida might understand the meaning of being hardcore, but not the behavior of them...but he will once the next wave of MMOs pop...because HC players are like a grasshopper swarm...they come in band, ge all they can while the population is mainly "underleveled" and, when the population become developed enough for their e-peen not being valuable enough (like the silver tricorne was at start...it was WAY more valuable e-peen-wise than any of these raid gears because of the amount of LS capable to actually atempt getting it) they just migrate to another recently launched MMO and start all over there...they rush to cap and start searching the e-peens before many others can at least atempt obtaining them...just for then to stay AFK at game main cities, showing-off his gear.
So yes, i still have hopes up that someday (maybe now...maybe in 1 year...maybe in 3 years) they will relaunch the original FFXIV as a spin-off FF game...or maybe not even as a FF game...and you know what? I would certainly buy it once again...because that game was worth having...a game balanced in every aspect of it that was just unfortunate regarding its playerbase.