Quote Originally Posted by Magikazam View Post
But if someone is interested purely in the gameplay and fight mechanic he has to watch the 750+ quests of MSQ or pay to skip them up to endwalker, Just sounds like a weird double standard to me. I get it appeals to casuals who are the biggest part of the player base, but MMO and Final Fantasy in general appeal to people who love to do fights and sometimes grind, the last 3 main games (Minus XIV) gameplay loop is still about fighting monsters tons like you would expect from a JRPG.

What I'm trying to say is that you can blame MMO players to ask for harder normal content, that are rampant in the genre, when they play a game marketed as ''The best MMORPG on the market''
I wouldn't call it a double standard, more someone not realizing or accepting what FFXIV is about. If someone is purely interested in combat, why play a game that straight-up markets itself as primarily a story-based MMO (one of the reasons it's frequently called an RPGMMO instead of an MMORPG). There are other games that heavily emphasize endgame raiding and see the story as just something to blow through as a means to get you to endgame. FFXIV isn't that game. It would be like playing an FPS set in WWI and being disappointed that it doesn't include modern tanks and jets.

Remember, when WoW was far and away the "best MMORPG on the market," it attained that status precisely by being more casual-oriented than other MMO's at the time. And end-game raiding at that time was practically nothing more than tank-and-spank with occasionally one other mechanic at most involved. The "hardest" part of combat was actually just managing to get 40 people together to do a raid.

There's also a direct link between WoW shifting to a "raid or die" mentality focusing on ever-more-difficult combat and eSports, and it's loss of that "best MMO" status. Put quite simply, the unofficial "best MMO of the moment" title has a long history of going to the game that is most casual-friendly and doesn't focus on "harder" normal content.