As far as Trusts, I like them a lot.

Or, well, I like what they make possible — Trusts themselves are pretty underwhelming (lol "We can't let them AOE or you won't play with other people" ).

But I think that the ability to experience the MSQ 100% "solo" is an excellent change.

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The fundamental issue is that the MSQ has always been ~90% "solo", and then randomly hits these awkward potholes where your Story pace is suddenly dictated by 3-7 other people who are really tired of doing this and just want to go home.

It's a bad clash, and the fact that Trusts allow players to keep the same wide-eyed, spectacle-awed, wandering-along seeing-the-sights feeling from MSQ start to finish is a great change.

That's why I also strongly-support adding Trial Trusts as well.

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Separate to this issue is that FFXIV's corner-cutting solution to problems isn't to rise up and excel at a new level of innovation, but instead to just amputate and break things until they're easier to deal with.

So at the same time that I strongly-value how much Trusts improve the player Story experience's consistency and atmosphere, I also intensely-dislike how content gets broken and remolded to force it to conform to the lazy level of AI that XIV's team is either willing or capable of implementing.

Basically, XIV's team trades out content potentially remaining interesting to veteran players in the long-term, for content that flows smoothly into the Story experience in the short-term.

Both goals are valuable, but coming at the expense of each other is frustrating.

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Ideally, XIV would actually do the grown-up solution like WOW, SWTOR, and... er... most other games do — implement easy versions of Dungeons for completing the Story, and then harder, more interesting, more complex versions as max-level variations.

Trusts are just fine for Story beats — "let's go through a Dungeon", "let's have a big epic Trial", etc. Pretty much RPG trope staples.

But once players begin repeating the content again and again, what Trusts can "handle" becomes a noticeably stale and repetitive handful of mechanical types.

If you split Trusts off into "first time Story content", and then created a second version of "The Real Instance" that actually shows up in Roulettes, it'd solve both issues.

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Personally, I don't really need to constantly be synced back down to Level 53 or 87. This is not enhancing the game for me. So I'm actually pretty comfortable with just letting NPCs handle "Leveling Roulette" tasks.

On the other hand, doing a WOW Mythic+ or SWTOR Master Mode or [etc, nearly every game has a similar system] type of split, where the leveling Dungeons become much harder endgame Dungeons once you complete the Story, would allow that content's layout and assets to not "go to waste", while also allowing its top-end version to be designed without needing to accommodate unintelligent AI scripts.

I'd love to revisit "real" versions of things like Toto-Rak, Sohm Al, Bardam's Mettle, Holminster Switch, etc, in — for example — Expert Roulette or Criterion at level 90, while leaving the "softened" Trust-compatible versions as Story/spectacle for people coming up through it all the first time.