FFXIV is reliable and consistent

[Bourne_Endeavor]

This reply is more for the conversation you are having with Vespar and not you directly but ya, kinda replying to you both.

The gating is more like a necessary evil, damned if you do, damned if you don't. However I do agree with Vespar's point, I do not think the artificial gating should be there. You are basically favoring the gating because the game has no content, so you are artificially extending it. I do not think that is a good model.

I do not like the predictability to the extent FFXIV does. This gives you a lot of insight of what and when it is worth even playing, what and when you need to prepare for and so on. So you end up not playing for huge gaps of time because you know when something will be drastically outdated. This thread is weird to me, praising the biggest flaw in this game.

You said it yourself. Content gating is a necessary evil for gaming as a whole, not simply FFXIV. No development team can sate how quickly their playerbase consumes content. While yes, FFXIV has been undeniably lackluster in some areas, saying they should remove gates and just make more content to compensate isn't realistic. Look at the raid tiers. This is content they spend months creating and the normal modes don't last more than two hours. Savage has greater longevity but groups above a casual level are usually done within two months. The 24 mans take 40-60 minutes yet likely take weeks, if not months to develop. Yoshida outright admitted Heaven on High took triple the resources and time of a dungeon despite it taking 8-10 hours to do a full 21-100 run.

Gates exist purely because it's impossible to develop enough content. No amount of money or new developers are going to change that.

[Sandpark]

You said it yourself. Content gating is a necessary evil for gaming as a whole, not simply FFXIV. No development team can sate how quickly their playerbase consumes content. While yes, FFXIV has been undeniably lackluster in some areas, saying they should remove gates and just make more content to compensate isn't realistic. Look at the raid tiers. This is content they spend months creating and the normal modes don't last more than two hours. Savage has greater longevity but groups above a casual level are usually done within two months. The 24 mans take 40-60 minutes yet likely take weeks, if not months to develop. Yoshida outright admitted Heaven on High took triple the resources and time of a dungeon despite it taking 8-10 hours to do a full 21-100 run.

Gates exist purely because it's impossible to develop enough content. No amount of money or new developers are going to change that.

There are different kinds of gates though.
Tombstones are a gate similar to the original XIV fatigue system. If you do too much endgame content on a character, you are capped earning more progression until the cap is lifted. Other games use RNG gates and endgame that consist of more than beat one boss or three bosses in 60 minutes to end the run. They have multiple goals throughout the entire zone than just beat a boss. The way games usually get around adding more to do while you wait on new content is adding an additional progression system like merits, champion points, masteries, and so on and so on. But something like that makes no sense here since all the hard stuff is capped and the open world is safe.

The achievement log/challenge log is sort of already built for something like that if the world supported it, a means to progress when you are capped on tomes. But then the players who play less would always be left behind.
Relic used to be that sort of thing here, where you went back and revisited older content to upgrade relic. Almost the same thing but you would upgrade your character and not a weapon.

[Hamada]

You said it yourself. Content gating is a necessary evil for gaming as a whole, not simply FFXIV. No development team can sate how quickly their playerbase consumes content. While yes, FFXIV has been undeniably lackluster in some areas, saying they should remove gates and just make more content to compensate isn't realistic. Look at the raid tiers. This is content they spend months creating and the normal modes don't last more than two hours. Savage has greater longevity but groups above a casual level are usually done within two months. The 24 mans take 40-60 minutes yet likely take weeks, if not months to develop. Yoshida outright admitted Heaven on High took triple the resources and time of a dungeon despite it taking 8-10 hours to do a full 21-100 run.

Gates exist purely because it's impossible to develop enough content. No amount of money or new developers are going to change that.

True I guess some gates are needed. What I meant was, there needs to be more content. I mean FFXI had good solutions for having different things to do, so why can't this game? Makes no sense just to paint a new ilevel on stuff we been doing for 5 years. FFXI did a better job at 'hiding' the gating by allowing you do different things and gave you plenty to do. Glaring at a currency weekly allowance does not show much creativity in design, feels lazy. FFXI did not do that but they still had time gates.

[Brightamethyst]

I mean FFXI had good solutions for having different things to do, so why can't this game?

XI handled it by just keeping everything relevant forever. That's fine, but it also meant people ran Dynamis and killed gods over and over again for YEARS. I am perfectly fine with gear tiers and content being obsoleted. Yes, it's basically still the same patterns over and over, but at least the scenery changes every few months.