Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
You don't create a mmo, and then figure out ways to reduce accessibility to its content for the playerbase.
Accessibility and casual/hardcore disparity is at least for me a bit different because some hardcore games can still be very accessible.
In the past Crafting and stuff like PvP wasn't very accessible. Now you can craft and pvp with any drawbacks in terms of Bis gear and in terms of unlocked skills. You just have them all immediately; you are set and ready the moment you have the level, you dont need to waste hours just to unlock another crossskill for example.

All this is nice in concept, it makes sense I give you that - but the thing is now - ff14 likes to make these things casual aswell. It is almost impossible to be really good at something, because everyone will be somewhat good anyway. There is no ceiling. Crafting and PvP need a bit of depth to be fun. It should be rewarding to be good at it. And this is lacking a lot.

It is not about gil, it is not about making things hard for casual players - it can still stay easy for them for the majority of items and let them one click macro stuff idc. But there have to be items that are rare. Rarity can be because it drops rarely, because the reward is limited or because it is simply difficult. An MMO without rarity doesn't feel rewarding, if you get the rewards for free it will not be special, I always like to achieve something in RPG after hours of investement. It is why ultimates have nice weapon models, high investment, hightier reward even if its only a skin.
So ye people just wanna be good at something and casualization mainly benefits the new players and destroys longterm interest. Its a slap in the face for veterans who invested to git gud at something.

Just look at the recent live letter, a big chunk of the "new" updates is catered to new players again. ARR flying, ARR story quests are shorter, ishgard restoration is the experience heaven for new crafters/gatherer, the new feature to play old primals on min ilvl but at lvl80 is also interesting to new players but not to old ones who beaten those fights legit anyway at that time. The 24 raid is outsourced. What we really get is one dungeon and hopefully a resistence weapon upgrade step that lasts longer than 30min. While in the background they start looking at their xbox launch to get even more new players.
This game had the most potential, the story and areas are super nice, the gameplay starts sucking more and more sadly imo.