Been seeing a lot of doomsaying in forums/in-game lately

[Liam_Harper]

The forums are starting to look more and more like the WoW forums, where it's constant bickering between the "it's fine, shut up" crowd and the people complaining.

I've seen a lot of game forums and I've learned is that it actually is possible to have a community that is mostly happy with a game. FF14 used to fall into this category too and while complaint threads existed, "game is dying" thread were usually ridiculed. I've also learned that no matter how bad a game is, there will always be a crowd of players who defend it to the death. I've even seen that in bad F2P games that went downhill and had to shut their servers down, the more the game died the more it felt like the majority of posters defended it. Most likely because the complainers gave up on feedback and left.

The reason I complain about FF14 is because I actually like the game, it has a brilliant development team and Yoshida's mindset of actually caring about his players is extremely rare. But just caring about players doesn't automatically make all your decisions good ones. Every expansion it feels like multiple things I used to love are ruined and a number of things I strongly dislike or have become bored of are reused and pushed on me. It's narrowing down the number of things I can do for fun here. It's at the point where the game is worth the sub, but if a better MMO was released with the good points of FF14 but also the things I miss that they've lost over the years I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.

I feel like Yoshida almost cares too much. He's poking his nose into every part of game design, even if he's not qualified for it. He's so heavily focused on making the game friendly for the most casual player he's even become blind to non-hardcore players with a braincell or two. He's afraid to take risks and churns out some of the same designs and systems they've used for a decade and probably intends to play safe another decade. He's afraid to say no and keeps churning out 2 jobs per expansion, tried to shove 2 races into one expansion and keeps trying to churn out housing wards instead of just going instanced and the team are working flat out but always falling behind.

The reason I keep leaving feedback is because I want them to succeed. But I'm a former WoW player and I know once a game goes too far downhill, it's done for a lot of people. WoW waited too long before trying to fix their game and they could release an absolutely solid expansion and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
If a better game came out and they lost me for a full expansion or two, it's unlikely I'd go back to FF even if they polished it.

This is just how I feel and I see no point in pretending it's not just because the aggressive positivity brigade don't like it.