Future direction of FFXIV

[Absurdity]

Content needs to keep you engaged, not just busy, and designing content that can keep players engaged for 3+ months is as good as nonexistent in this game.

Most combat content in this game is so incredibly easy and mindnumbingly boring that I have to force myself to do it, this is never going to change and I have accepted that.
The few difficult activities we actually have are engaging...for when you progress through them and then at best the first 5 times you do them after the initial kill, you can only whack the same 4 bosses so many times between raid tiers before the mechanics dance becomes just another "going through the motions".

Where the long term engagement comes from is your job. Playing an engaging job can keep you entertained for a very long time, especially when you're trying to optimize and master it.
It doesn't require a specific difficulty for the content either, you can bring an engaging job into the most mindless content and still have a good time.

This is why SE's crusade against the skill-ceiling is such a baffling thing, all it will do is make people bored of the game at an even more accelerated rate.


Let me take the healer design as an example and exaggerate it a bit more.
Let's assume every job is designed to make you spam 1 button for the entire fight, maybe 2-3 oGCDs that you just press on cooldown, and the skill-ceiling would be pressing 1 as often as you can.
I would quit the game right here and now because, no matter how difficult or "busy" the content, I would be bored out of my mind almost immediately.


Healers aren't quite that bad, but they're very close...as is warrior if you really think about it.