I'm finding the "choosing not to educate yourself" angle quite an interesting take. A lot of replies seem to be coming from the perspective that the Lodestone is required reading in some fashion, which I continue to think is quite the leap. I choose to educate myself in the game by immersing myself in the game. That's not something to be smugly finger-wagged at - it's a precedent FFXIV sets itself; with clear in-game tooltips, active help popups, and all sorts of explanatory features available to players. It's easy to say "You should have done X" if X is something you're used to doing. But every other in-game feature and system I've encountered has needed no such extra-curricular reading to work. To use. To not lose your hard earned possessions.

A good game should explain itself to a sufficient extent within itself. Patch notes, Lodestone articles etc, should - in my opinion, clearly the opinion of others, and as a precedent set by countless other games in the genre - be supplementary reading. FFXIV does, like any MMO worth its salt, do this for almost everything else I've ever encountered. Moreso, in fact - the torrent of "Active Help" popups that accompany any new feature is a testament to how Squenix have made this work in so many other areas of the game. That makes its absence in this situation stand out like a sore thumb.

You're right in one sense. I have learned something. And it's that my trust in Squenix to communicate sufficiently to players was too easily earned. If I were to play again, I would be reading up on things like this - not because I thought it was a reasonable expectation to have of a player, but because I doubted Squenix's capacity to make really important information available as they should.