What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Provoke]

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

Will you give me an example? Not even trying to be an asshole here.

[Penthea]

Lack of communication with the EU/NA playerbase.

I am completely used to this from my time in WoW. Despite the fact that the USA shares a language that most EU players speak, it was very rare for Blizzard representatives to make forum post statements in the EU forums. It was almost always in NA.

What sucked about this is in WoW server regions are segregated. You can't play on NA with an EU account and you can't post on the NA forums with an EU account. At least here if you do speak Japanese you can post on the language forum where feedback is more likely to be read directly by SE's dev team without needing to purchase a second account.

All that being said it's been a long time since I posted in the WoW forums given that I quit the game a long time ago, so maybe the forum segregation has since been removed. I hope so. It was quite frustrating to almost always have to go to the NA forums to read blue posts and be utterly unable to directly respond to them. Or at the very least I hope Blizzard now have more presence in the EU forums so that EU players can respond to their posts.

------

As for what I consider are the big issues in the game:

I have seen numerous examples of players being disciplined by SE for their behaviour and when they ask the GM exactly what they did wrong, the GM responds with something along the lines of "we cannot discuss this with players" which is baffling. How are players supposed to improve their behaviour if they have to guess what they did wrong? This is so unbelievably ridiculous.

Blacklisting is pretty bad. You cannot blacklist someone unless they say or emote something in the chatbox. Which means you have to hang around and wait for that person you don't like to say or do something in your presence. This is terrible because in some cases this means players end up being exposed to more abuse instead of being able to blacklist whenever they want and entirely prevent it from happening again.

Housing availability and acquisition methods are in an abysmal state. Far better than before but still nowhere near good. The housing content itself is really good but getting a house can be such a frustrating experience that it renders many players feeling hopeless about their chances to experience that content. Some players have been trying to get their first house for literally years. It's awful.

The mentor system is a wonderful idea that is often being ruined by trash mentors. The requirements need to be higher and there should be an advanced version of the novice hall required to achieve the mentor tag (that tests more advanced mechanics like stacking, proximity aoes, passing a buff/debuff to others in the team, surviving tank busters with cds, using role actions to stun, etc). Any idiot can get classes to 80 and eventually get enough commendations. Furthermore mentors should not have so much control over the NN chat. Some are abusing their "mod" privileges to remove players who disagree with them using the chat channel as a general chat room while ignoring new players seeking help.

The game is in dire need of a fc recruitment system. Right now all that players can do in game is use the shout channel in various hubs and advertise on party finder. The fact that party finder is so often used for this just shows that the game is lacking a very useful feature.

Viera and hrothgar are absolutely shafted for head options. No hats, which means most headgear is invisible on them, and they have the lowest amount of hairstyles in the game. Especially hrothgar. And the fact that hrothgar need to fantasia to get a completely new hairstyle is beyond absurd. It's been over a year since they came to the game and ZERO updates. Not even a sneak peek of what they're working on. At this point I'm not expecting anything before 6.0

Still getting genderlocked gear. It's 2020. Let people wear what they want. So much of the genderlocked gear looks unisex which makes it even more silly.

For the love of god can we please get a way to preview mog station outfits on our characters without having to find a player who already bought the outfit so we can try it on?

[EmmetOtter]

• More ambient sound. When I walk past a line of vendors I should hear their chatter. When I interact with a NPC there should be sound for them saying hello and goodbye (or something along those lines). If I walk in a wilderness with animals nearby I should hear them. The game feels like a silent movie most of the time.
  
• Voice acting for my own character. Its absolutely stupid that everyone else talks but all my guy can is nod.
  
• Instead of freezing our character in place and forcing me to repeatedly click through a chain of dialogue, allow me to just step away from the NPC, canceling all remaining dialogue.
  
• Quests with more emphasis on fighting and combine chained talking-only quests. What I mean by "chained talking-only quests" are: I meet up with Alphy and he talks (not "we", just "he"), 1-on-1. Next quest, go to a different town and meet with him again, 1-on-1, more talking. Repeat. If someone treated me like this in RL I would cut them off because there's no reason for that and its just wasting my time. After the 1st meet, have the next quest be "kill x enemies to get items" or "recon this area" or something. Then the next meeting with Alphy is discussing what I found with an action step after.

There's a lot I like about this game but the MSQ is just not one of them. The repeated "talk, talk, talk" chain of quests is tedious. Every quest should move the story forward somehow and having 3+ quests in a row where only someone talks at me doesn't do that. It creates a very tedious play.

[Xatsh]

IN my opinion there are a lot of things that could be improved the biggest 4 are as followed

1) Complete lack of Guild Related Content. In almost all successful mmos guilds are a center point and focus for the community. IN FFXIV the only thing they guilds are is a glorified chat channel and some minor buffs which really are insignificant. There need to be content added to encourage the formation of guilds and stuff for guilds to do together at all levels of the game begining, mid-game, and both casual/hardcore endgame. All endgame content in ffxiv is currently revolving around duty finder pug groups or static groups, this is anti-guild and needs to change.

2) Economy. FFXIV has one of the best crafting and gathering system mechanic wise in the genre... but outside of food/pots...vanity gear and making stuff for other crafters is the only thing worthwhile for crafters. The supply exceeds demand by several hundred times over. And the everyone can level everything has made it where prices fluctuate by nearly 50% on some days. In my opinion crafting gear should be equivalent to top tier raid gear. Should include crafting with really rare drops. And Gil should mean something outside houses and glamour. This would need a full overhaul though to address. I would give the crafting/gather systems in this game a 9/10. I would give the economy design a 1/10.

3) Content Life Span. It is horribly low. Major Patch cycles tend to be 4-5 months and outside some relic step content last at most 2-3 months. And all content is replaced every expansion. Simply causes a lack of stuff to do at the top end unless you are going for glamour and mounts. People running out of content that quickly is bad for retention of players.

4) Gear. It is boring. basically someone on a spread sheet dragged down to get all the main and secondary stats for each class. This is one of the worst gear systems stat wise I have ever seen in a mmo.

With all that said. these are so core ingrained in ffxiv at this point I know nothing will change about any of these.

[Barraind]

Itemization.

Near obsolescence of the dungeon system.

Severe simplification / dumbing down of healers and crafters.

Incoherent glam system.

MSQ-locking every piece of content.

Lifespan of patch cycles (last couple expansions have shown we really need the first two grindy relic / alt advancement steps of the expansion in the .5 and .25 patches)

[Alleluia]

Having to go to an inn room to change glamour plates is annoying.

As I've finally bothered to get more involved in the True End Game lately, this statement resonates with me.

[*]Voice acting for my own character. Its absolutely stupid that everyone else talks but all my guy can is nod.

Maybe incorporate the emote sounds that come with your chosen voice pack into scenes, but actual voice acting? No. Not unless they can offer options and you can choose it, and even then, it'll be divisive. There's no way that the majority of players will be happy with their characters suddenly having audible dialogue unless they started like that.

[*]Instead of freezing our character in place and forcing me to repeatedly click through a chain of dialogue, allow me to just step away from the NPC, canceling all remaining dialogue.

I only noticed this recently, but you actually CAN sometimes now. Not with every, or even most, NPCs, though. Also, no idea how long that functionality has been in the game. I just found it on accident.

[Wyakin]

I’d like to see better job balancing. No more ranged tax. Bring back mch ammo.

The mentor system is a joke.

Item level sync content is dumb, make content that is balanced around the current tier gear. The excuse that “it’s to allow new people to join” is dumb.

[DPZ2]

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

The google doc you reference was written two years before the NA/EU data centers were moved/updated in 2019. The words 'Europe', 'Japan', 'America' and 'data center' do not appear in the document, nor is there anything talking about 'better servers'.

Your observation does not appear to be true, at least from the evidence provided.

[M0rrigan]

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

It's not that JP servers are better. Japan is a relatively smaller country, acting as a whole region for a datacenter while other regions are basically continents. If you're living in Japan, it doesn't matter in what province/prefecture you live, you'll always be close to the servers location and have low ping. Same thing happens with South Korean games because SK is a small country and mostly based on Seoul, most Korean players have 9-10 ping. For other regions you can get differences of hundreds of ping depending on where you live, even if you're from that region.

[KayRadley]

Housing, needs to be unlimited, with no 30day deconstruction. [/SIZE]

We already tried that before. That's how we got house flipping that was bloody terrible. This is why we cannot have nice things.