YoshyP saved FF 14 but also killing it.

[ovIm]

It's malicious at that point. They clearly hate the playerbase doing anything that they did not expect. They hate that you are not playing the game they want you to. They hate that you find fun in something they don't.

You saying that reminds me of the Eureka thing way back in SB. When Eureka Anemos was released, some issues with the combat system were already visible there - namely, that the rotations of the jobs, without a boss that sometimes throws wrenches in your way, were not particularily fun to execute (friction creates tension creates excitement, who would have thought). So grinding mobs for hours to end did feel boring to many a players (which is where a lot of the complains came from).
The community mitigated that a bit by using fate trains. Suddenly, Eureka Anemos meta gameplay became this super Zerg that ran through the map at high speeds and obliterated NMs. That gave people a lot of time to at least chat occasionally, taking a break from crunching monsters as the people working on spawning the NMs always rotated a bit.

CS3 disliked that the fate-train method preferred by the players so much that in Pagos, the possibility to Zerg like that was nerfed to the ground. That killed a lot of the enthusiasm players had (at least what I have seen, YMMV), many people on my own server and Discords at that time (myself included) turned their back on Eureka because of that. And that very sentiment you just said, "they hate that we are not playing the game the way they want us to", was something that was said a lot, at least through the people I associated by that time. Now I can't remember if they outright confirmed that this was the case or not, but it certainly felt that way.

Only with Pyros afterwards they managed to come back around somewhat, but you still have to clear Pagos to get to Pyros.

[Kazuke_Miso]

Suddenly, Eureka Anemos meta gameplay became this super Zerg that ran through the map at high speeds and obliterated NMs. That gave people a lot of time to at least chat occasionally, taking a break from crunching monsters as the people working on spawning the NMs always rotated a bit.

CS3 disliked that the fate-train method preferred by the players so much that in Pagos, the possibility to Zerg like that was nerfed to the ground.

This is 100% right. The only time this dev team makes significant changes is when they hate that you're having fun with a method they didn't anticipate.

Of course they don't want to ever outright admit it, but they have designed FF14 in an extremely player-antagonistic way for years now. Think about housing. Savage gear lockouts. Tomestone lockouts. Content being spread across four weeks each. Weekly lockouts being put in every single type of content. Achievements that are grindier than what you see in a KMMO.

It's so, so, so ironic that one of the chief complaints of FF14 1.0 is that they timegate you so hard and start nerfing your XP the longer you play. But modern FF14 has far more timegates than FF14 1.0.

They hated that people were being more efficient in Anemos even if it hurt no one because they want you to spend 3 months in that zone grinding so you pay $39.