Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Vhailor]

You mean that patches and/Or ilvl increases should be more spread out or you mean like last tier raid gear should matter for the new one?

Because I honestly can see the problems you are talking about but aside spreading patch release or making raid gear matter more I don't really see much more solutions

They need to branch into horizontal gearing, where new content drops situationally-useful gear that doesn't flat-out overpower what came before it.

XI offers a good example of this. At the end of ToAU, which was about the five-year mark, end-game content over from Zilart and CoP - the previous two expansions - was still perfectly relevant and routinely run. The items they dropped were still BiS - in some situations. ToAU offered other items that were better in other situations. Not every job would benefit from every piece of content, but end-game communities generally did a good job making sure everyone got their critical items (which itself served as an incentive to run a variety of content).

In XIV, we literally have a scenario in which the hardest content in the game - currently Ultima Weapon Ultimate - drops rewards that will struggle to even place in the 'top 10 most powerful weapons' list six months after its release. That is insane. It means all you're chasing is the Glamour, and very temporary bragging rights. Worse still, both of those also deteriorate over time, because iLevel scaling dictates that in a year or so, the content won't be half as hard to clear, much as Coil is a lot easier now than it was. Once people can low-man the thing, you've literally done the fight only for the experience. Which, I should say, is very worthwhile - or at least I imagine it is - but still.

Alternately, they could slow down the rate of iLevel progression, or stretch out the content releases and increase the grind accordingly. I think I'd rather see horizontal progression, though.

[Maeka]

They need to branch into horizontal gearing, where new content drops situationally-useful gear that doesn't flat-out overpower what came before it.

No, no, and HECK NO.

"Side-grade gear" that is situational would NOT work in this game.

1). You can't switch gear in combat.
2). Requiring "____ resistant" gear forces people to go farm it before they can even do the content (WoW tried this and quickly abandoned the idea for good reason).
3). People will still min/max and go whatever is best for all situations, and the side-grades will be looked at as useless.

It. Will. Not. Work. so please just give it a rest. This game was *NOT* built on Side-grades. This game is a vertical progression game and TBH I don't want to have to stop and grind an extra suit of gear that's the same I-level as what I'm already wearing because of some stupid gimmick in a dungeon/trial/whatever.

It was retarded in XI and it would be 1000% more retarded here in XIV to do such a thing. Side-grade gear in XI was stuff you only wore for 2 seconds at a time to boost your next WS/spell/whatever by 2% or what-not. It felt like a complete waste of time, it was a waste of inventory space, and there's a reason why the game struggled to maintain more than a hundred K subscribers at a time, while vertical progression games rake in millions of subs.

Vertical progression feels better when you get a new piece, it is substantially better, than this side-grade that is only better in one thing otherwise about as good as what you already had kinda deal that just ruins the joy of getting a new piece of gear.

There's nothing wrong with old gear being obsolete as new gear comes out. Not seeing what the problem is, when you have glamours and such.

[Remedi]

If they need to rebuild the game from the ground up to accomodate horizzontal progression they might aswell make a new game imho.
As of right now horizzontal progression is kinda meaningless, however I would admit that Ultimate challenges does kinda provide a sense of horizzontal progression if you think about it