Quote Originally Posted by Mawlzy View Post
Aha. Common ground. You're quite right that the presence of hardcore content has no impact on me at all, in principle.

In practice, however, and as evidenced by the last LL, these limited resources that SE labors under means that content that I do like is lacking.

I would also argue that the direction of the game - to a very specific and limited form of PvE that to me is mind-numbingly dull - is being driven to a large extent by what SE believes the raiding community wants. And we have been promised that 8.0 will again double-down on this philosophy (cf. changes to BLM so that a once slow-caster can keep up with the stupid DDR design).
I'd argue that their DDR design is actually one of FFXIV's strongest points. The problem starts being on the way they implement difficulty, like for instance, you feel like the PvE part of the game is mind-numbing boring, that's because they dumbed down every single job to make it "accessible" for people to go into savage, a misunderstanding that people don't go into savage because they don't like that type of content, but people who enjoy savage raiding did not ask for the jobs to be dumbed down.

Yoshi-P blamed the community because we complained about jobs being too clunky and complex, I always found this to either be a misunderstanding or a redirection of blame. Players complain about stuff they enjoy all the time.
I think the true reason is because it's cheaper to design content when it's not bogged down by job complexity.

Long-term MMOs always end up with this issue mind you, jobs in WoW felt complex during Vanilla whereas the way it evolved had highs and lows on how samey all their jobs and skill trees started feeling. So it's hard for me to judge not being a developer.