So, can we just ban damage meters already.

[Driavna]

I'm curious, since this was upvoted I'm assuming players don't want a gradual difficulty curve or "easy to play, hard to master" classes. Since ff14 is marketed towards a casual playerbase foremost, being a theme park story-driven game at heart, if they chose to focus on a single demographic, they'd choose casual.

Does this mean the popular opinion is to delete EX, Savage and Ultimate entirely, make high skill cap classes like Ninja simple and focus entirely on the casual player? Genuine question, just unsure what you're disagreeing on specifically.

Going to be blunt: casual does not equal to "ultra-easy mode" and/or lack of complexity (and no, not everything needs to be savage/ultimate). FFXIV at launch was a casual game regarding the time required but generally speaking, was more difficult/interesting (and I don't mean only raid content). Since then SE has been lowering the bar with no results (right now we have a topic about people lowering their ilvl to avoid certain content) outside annoying current players (in particular healers and probably tanks too). From my point of view, SE is following Blizzard footsteps with FFXIV.

I will also confess that my disagreement with you was mainly about Wildstar, but I just forgot to edit my post and add the extra information. Making it short Wildstar failed because of a rushed launch with bad performance, a lot of bugs and the game tried to pander to many playstyles (yep, only raids were aimed to hardcore). At launch, there wasn't enough content for anyone (plus the available one was buggy).

If instead of pandering to everyone Carbine decided to focus on one demographic and keep a realistic budget the game will have been probably alive today. You don't need millions of players to be successful and profitable.

Before finishing I have one question for you: why adapt FFXIV for solo players that only want to enjoy the story and do not want to bother learning the basics when SE can release another single-player FF title?

Edit: Once again I forgot about something! Ninja was not a hard class to play but after ShB became more awkward. Example: bushin has to be paired with trick attack but you are also required to use all your heavy hitters with includes ninjutsu that is not cloned by bushin and will delay your next weaponskill.