Future direction of FFXIV

[IdowhatIwant]

Do you guys feel like the current dev team is incapable to lead this game 6.1 and beyond because of the good amount of complaints between gameplay, story, and general content releases. Should we shuffle devs around or replace Yoshi-P? Are people overall happy with the state of this game?

I do not think the current dev team is incapable to lead the game. How ever I will say they need to stop giving into to some player feed back particularly from NA. IMO a good example of this is the introduction of soloing the story from 1 - 90 through a newly implemented trust system. This takes a lot of dev time for something to appease what I would consider a smaller portion of the player base. I could understand if the game was designed differently or if this was to ensure new players could complete the story. But the games design is set up to have higher level players assist new players with this content. I also am of a mind set if you want a single player experience don't play a MMO. I don't believe this is a terrible idea to implement, but IMO it is something you would add as a necessity due to a large decline in player base, which this game is not experiencing currently.

I think the direction they are going with the game is the wrong direction and has been the wrong direction since Stormblood. We have seen the number of options you have to complete dailies go down, classes feeling very homogenized, and savage raid content that looks no different than your trial content. As it is right now most healers and tanks play almost exactly the same outside of a few minor differences. Most DPS for the most part still have a uniqueness to them, but that is slowly being homogenized as well. I would really like us to go back to HW / ARR where we have more dungeons that do not feel so copy/paste and savage raids differentiate themselves from the trial content by having something before the bosses. The very poorly outdated materia system really needs a rework to give the game some sort of flair to help you differentiate yourself from other players (granted there will always be a meta). It would also be nice if the savage content was released at a better pace. We are currently 4 months into EW, and we will not receive any additional savage raid tier content until atleast August or September. That is almost 8 months for players that want to participate in this content to wait, and most of them are likely going to just quit until then.

I think FFXIV's greatest downfall is going to be to appease casual players too much, at the cost of having any sort of end game, or post game content. Diversity is what keeps games like this alive, and I feel that FFXIV's content diversity has been dissipating to copy paste of what we had previously just reskinned.
Now to your final question, I have not been very happy with the game since Stormblood, Shadowbringers gave me some sort of hope with its MSQ, but only to fall into a drought for end game content. I fear EW will be the same, although I personally thought EW was a disappointment story wise as well. I personally feel the game lacks a lot of content under the guise of respecting players time. If it really respected my time it would give me more options instead of less.

As great as the Garlemald section was, we kinda covered most of the major story beats involving it already. A whole expansion dedicated to it would be a waste, especially after ShB.

People who didn't like EW will probably focus a lot on what could've been, but I can assure them that a Garlemald-focused expansion would've been even worse. There simply wasn't enough ground to cover.

I agree, how ever I think most players were very hyped to finally visit Garlemald. What we got was just an area we had seen in a cutscene from ShB but destroyed now, and a frozen wasteland. We never got to really go into the city of Garlemald itself. I feel that we should have had a little more Garlemald, and a little less Moon and Thavnir. Thavnir felt like it was only included in the plot as a location where they can kill off characters with out any repercussions from the fan base. The dragon plot did not need to happen, nor did it really serve much of a purpose in the grand scheme of the plot. EW as a whole suffered many of the same issues that Stormblood had.