Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[Adrestia]

To be clear this isn't even a matter of difficultly, its a matter of perception. OP perceives FFXIV as becoming too "easy" and therefore not fun. Yet how many people would really continue to pay $13-$15 a month if they could only access half or less of the content that they wanted to played because the game was designed only for the most skilled players.

The community in WoW ruined the game long before the current expansion. All endgame content became gated behind max item levels that you could only get by already having done the content. Hardcore and Midcore got to have an exclusive club and feel superior to the casuals that only were allowed a watered down version of the raids.

The first sign of an MOO dying is not the hardcore or the midcore leaving.

Umm...did we play the same WoW? With the advent of Badges of Justice (tomestones) in The Burning Crusade, WoW pioneered the concept that even if you take a break or start later, you can catch up to current tier item levels. If you can’t do Mythic raids today, it’s not because you don’t have access to strong enough gear from the last half dozen raid tiers.

For what it’s worth, I hate the badge/tomestones system for creating this race to the top and the death of old content. In EverQuest, “raid gear” and “all the other gear” were on such disparate power levels that if you wanted to raid top tier content from any of the last 3 or 4 years, you had to go back and progress through expansions to gear your people up. I realize in today’s MMO ecosystem that must sound terrible, what with old raids being ghost towns and the gear being dramatically worse than what you get for completing your first solo quest in the newest expansion. But back in EQ, when this instant gratification catch-up gear wasn’t available, that old content wasn’t abandoned. Instead, on any given server, you’d have some guilds raiding the latest content, some raiding the previous expansion, and some the expansion before that. Everyone still bought the new expansion because it offered a lot more than just endgame raids. They were just content to get to those raids a bit later (or never raid at all).

[DarkEiraStar]

Umm...did we play the same WoW? With the advent of Badges of Justice (tomestones) in The Burning Crusade, WoW pioneered the concept that even if you take a break or start later, you can catch up to current tier item levels. If you can’t do Mythic raids today, it’s not because you don’t have access to strong enough gear from the last half dozen raid tiers.

I'm not talking about the game itself, but the player base. If you wanted to do raiding outside of LFR you had to either raid with your guild or pug. If for whatever reason you couldn't raid with your guild and didn't want to leave you were left with pugging. And the vast majority of pug groups wanted you to have x ilvl (which you was often way higher than you needed or could only get by doing that raid) and proof that you had already completed the raid by sharing your achievement.