Quote Originally Posted by HighlanderClone View Post
When content and job design are regressing, going back to the "good old days" is a positive. The old days were good. There is nothing wrong with pining for the good old days when the game was more engaging in the past. The current philosophy is something even Yoshi P regrets pursuing. Even the developer team does not want to move forward with the current philosophy. They want to go back, maybe not entirely to SB but it still shows that there is merit to the "good old days".

OK, maybe you believe /r/ffxivdiscussion or somewhere else is the pinnacle of quality gameplay discussion and so believe everything you've read. But I've seen absolutely NO ONE make an effort to disentangle HW's objectively poor job clunkiness, horrible job QoL like stance switching on tanks, and pointless systems like accuracy, versus the superior job identity, higher skill ceilings, engaging and unique gameplay like SMN's DoT extension or AST's time mage gameplay. It's easy to dismiss the pining for HW/SB as rose-tinted glasses, but it's much harder for people to justify why the positive aspects of the previous expansions cannot be brought back into modern FF14. It's so hard that nobody ever tries to tackle it and resort to the lazy attempt to dismiss everything as nostalgia.
The interesting thing is you don't actually know that they want to "go back", and certainly not where they want to "go back" to. Focusing more on job identity could mean so many things. It's such a general sentiment that we can only speculate as to what that would look like and where they would take their inspiration from.

And I'm sorry, but it is absolutely rose-tinted glasses. I'm very confident that a majority of the playerbase, if given the choice, would prefer the game in its current iteration over HW. I could absolutely see an argument for some aspects of StB, but there were issues there that I would not like to see repeated.

You also seem to have missed my point when I mentioned the types of players and content that the complaints are coming from. Stating that I believe the majority of the responses here are from more casual players is not a knock against them, but more so pointing out where these problems are more obvious because they cover a wider range of the playerbase compared to the higher end content. It certainly was not intended to demean them or somehow prove I was better.