Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[strawberrycake]

All this stuff.

You can say all of this and blizzard has done all of these bad things yes. But that doesn't mean XIV is without fault and people can dislike many things about how 14 runs just like you dislike how many things about WoW is ran. You sound like you were particularly burned by WoW and now want to see it burn, and now are ignoring many of XIVs flaws to say WoW is bad to make yourself feel better.

For XIV lets talk about how they have forgetten systems like Deep dungeons[I know they are adding a new one, but they could have easily kept the old ones updated with rewards], how Diadem is only ever useful and playable once and then useless again, only to need to be reworked and end up back in that cycle.

Let's talk about how the content is so focused on catch up for players who don't even get the gear that relevent content is made moot within a few week to a few months. Let's talk about how they havn't fixed the ilvl cheese for Crystal Tower, How they have let trolls mas-reporting made entire servers refuse to talk in game, or make people not wanna teach how to play better in runs anymore, how their devs have openly admited to being scared of feed back and change, how their conservative response to everything is no longer an issue within just NA but lately Japan as well. And these are but a few issues.

No one is saying WoW is better or perfect, No one is saying XIV is out right bad. But what you're doing is making it harder for us to discuss issues that are present that could make this game better, and for someone like you, better then WoW. It's more then obvious that with 16s development, and with how large this game has grown they were not prepared for this, and they still have not risen to the challenge. This much more Conservative approach is just as bad as FOMO, because nothing is worth while.

In my opinion, making everything so (not a big deal) is just as bad as FOMO, because its a one and done, and later players will have a hard time doing it. And this isn;t the first MMO to meet WoW FOMO with making content that isn't important to do. because now I see a lot of older content people dislike doing or won't do. And Yes there is the nice PF people on Occasion, or the great FC people will join and then leave in a few months, But the content should just be doable baseline.

So TL;DR?

WoW is bad, and has done bad things And XIV is bad and has done bad things are shit takes.

It should be, MMOs are Iterative and sometimes Devs like to be know it alls and not listen, and then make bad products. Not one game in this entire industry, has survived not listening to it's players, XIV won;t WoW leanred what happens when they don't, and we need to stop circle jerking about XIV being *Better* and focus on talking about all flaws in good faith and give resonable feed back to fix things. Or this could be a discussion about XIV in another MMOs forums in a few years, about all the things it did wrong and why it's bad now.

Edit: Also the you seemed burned by WoW bit. I didn't mean that in a mean or sarcastic way. It's very much ok to feel burned by a game you seem to have invested a lot into. Let's normalize that to, people feeling burned by games they invested into. Because it can and has happened with XIV just like it's happned with WoW.