Lack of content on patch release

[Maeka]

Firstly, FFXIV is not very casual-friendly. It's incredibly mechanics-intensive, which is quite punishing for people who are more casual gamers.

Only when you get to the non-Casual (Savage) Content.

Duty Finder is very casual-friendly except for a few outliers (Shinryu, and maybe Fluminis).

There's a significant number of abilities available, and mastering them is complex.

Not really. I haven't found a job yet that I couldn't play casually and passably well for Duty Finder content.

I've gotten NIN to 60, RDM to 59, PLD and WHM both on 70. Nothing about any of those jobs is all that hard.

The 'real' end-game (Glamours and such) are murderously expensive, or insanely time-consuming to acquire. The Relic weapons - supposedly the casual player's path toward end-game level gear - have, prior to Eureka at least, been ridiculous time sinks.

I don't know of any casual player who NEEDS the Relic Weapons. The current "Relic" weapon is from Eureka, and that one isn't that bad, I hear players being able to do it in 6-10 hours.

The storyline bloat and the sequential nature of the MSQ makes getting started a brutally time-intensive process as well (but, oh, wait, you can pay extra to skip this... what a convenient fix).

It can be done quite casually, an hour here, and hour there and you will eventually get there. That's how I did half of it, I would log on for an hour or two and whittle away at them and just enjoy them cutscenes and lore.

FFXIV is good about enabling people to catch up to modest gear levels upon hitting level cap. That's really about it, as far as newbie-friendliness goes.

Everything in Duty Finder and outside of Savage/Ex is casual-friendly, lol. FFXIV is a game you can log on for just a bit and do your daily roulettes, any beast tribes you're interested in and still have a little time to do put into other things too (gathering, GC turn-ins, what-not). Now if you're a casual player, then no maybe you can't afford the most expensive glamours, maybe you won't have a mansion, etc, but you don't NEED those things to have fun in FFXIV.

Secondly, aiming to be casual-friendly does not excuse Yoshi-P and the development team from treating shallowness almost as a point of pride. The original statement was a positive one (affirming commitment to a good experience for casual gamers), not a negative one (avoiding a good experience for anyone with more than 10 or so hours a week to play). So can we discard it as an excuse for the sort of bland bullshit SE has been feeding us for well over a year now?

If they did give things that were 10 hours per week of content, then casual players would get left in the dust because they simply couldn't keep up with that kind of ridiculous content release.

As I previously said, Yoshi-P says he wants us to play FFXIV for awhile, turn it off, and play something else for awhile too. He can't have a game like that if he dumps a ridiculous time sink that causes us to feel like we MUST play 10+ hours a week.

As it is, players have no control over themselves already, as evidenced by the relic weapon quests pre-Eureka where people would grind hour after hour after hour doing nothing but that grind and then burn out and then complain that they don't like FFXIV because it's too grindy. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to do that grind. Why do you think there's a 450 Tomestone Cap per week? Why do you think you can only do 12 beast tribe quests per day?

Because time-gating is the ONLY way to get players to limit how much they do, otherwise they would log on for 48 hours straight and gobble up all the content like greedy pigs at the feeding trough and then complain when it's all done and there's nothing left to do.

Players have no self-control, they've proven this in any MMORPG that has ever existed. They have to do it RIGHT NOW. They gotta have it NOW NOW NOW NOW. They can't proceed at a steady pace, oh no. It's gotta be ASAP.

EDIT: Just look at the whine threads about maintenance if you want a dose of players chomping at the bit to devour the content as soon as absolutely possible.