Quote Originally Posted by Galibier View Post
The "grind" could be intentional though. I read a lot about people complaining about the "grind" here, but then in other games that don't do as well now I remember seeing all of the complaints, when they still had a lot of players, of it being a "WoW Clone." MMORPGs have always been kinda niche. Even WoW when it first came out did things to set itself apart from the other MMOs out there. Now the market is just about saturated and, with rare exceptions, most actively try/tried to chase WoW in one way or another. We see how that went.

So maybe, due to those failures, this is just a way of saying "hey we don't want to try and take players who like WoW, we want players who are turned off by WoW." I know I find what many call a grind here downright refreshing after the changes to EQ2, then RIFT and SWTOR. Not to say SE is doing as good a job as they could, but there could be a method to it all.
But XIV is a WoW clone. The combat system is a carbon-copy. It's super boring, and I think the only reason this game wasn't DoA was because of the console versions duping those people who haven't had the experience to learn better into thinking it had something interesting to offer.