FF community is the strangest i seen in any MMO over the past 20 years.
There's more toxic ones like wow, but FF is just weird.
Haven't seen anything similar to the outrage about male Viera, aside from gender locked classes, but even that isn't as bad as this. Devs had to take time from their free time, to bring it to Endwalker, because of the mass hysteria. I think there was people who said they were going to cancel their sub and pre-order of ShB, if there was no male Viera.
I'd like the devs to have this mentality too. They are devs because they know what they are doing, but ppl keep complaining until devs have to give in.
Like,i remember at ARR launch there was this 1man instance to fight a THM summoning a vodiriga or what not, it cast poison on you, and if you don't use antidote, you die. Well it was to difficult apparently to use an antidote, so they had to nerf it until it wasn't needed.
That's why all the content and skills are so simplified. Just looking at the expansion trailers, we know they are good at what they are doing, but most ppl seem to think they know better, what's good design.
I can't Imagine it's very exciting to be dev, not being able to follow your vision and creativity, because it's bottlenecked by ppl wanting to diminish it. It's like conservatives wanting minorities to continue not having same rights, and devs having to do that, to keep subs.
Their consern should be to make a good game that attract people that like it, not to make a simplified cash cow for subs - quality will attract a lot of gamers anyway.
I see it often when someone has very strong criticism of something, there's always someone saying: then unsub, find another game, bye.
This isn't about XIV, but ppl been complaining about FF7R/XVI being action oriented, and are adamant about the soul of FF is ATB. XVI seems more like DmC, which i like, but if i talk about that with some ppl, their respons is: no! FF should be ATB, if you don't like it, go play DmC, leave FF alone! Why can't it evolve? /shrug