The ONE Deal-Breaking Feature You MUST Have

[Emulord]

Deal - Breaker: World immersion. The world needs to pull us in, fascinate us, make our journey special. The world need to be breathing with life, the players need to have freedom to engage a variety of activities and have the opportunity to play our character the way we want to play it (anytime!). I want to feel like I'm part of it, not just a player farming quest and tough fights for a collection of items.

Sub-deal-breaker: It's actually hard to enjoy something when you can't participate in it. Half the time, I can't find a party in my limited play time. That sucks, really bad. Hopefully the content finder feature will be as promising as Yoshi-P state it will be... and people actually use it (not like the search feature) instead of shouting in town.

[Don't get started on the "oh another one whining about finding a party", not everyone can always log at peak times. HALF the time I'm off peak time and I don't have the luxury of waiting 1~2hrs to get a party ready.]

2.0 sounds promising, I can't wait to see more in August and experience it next year. I hope it keeps all of its promises.

In addition to what Onisake just said, the bigger issue which still is to fix, but that will not really depend on the devs' will, is the lack of a decent population. Only a successful 2.0 launch could lead to an enhancement of the situation, but they have to manage to deliver a ground-breaking - no pun related to Dalamud - new client...

[Onisake]

[. . .] the lack of a decent population. Only a successful 2.0 launch could lead to an enhancement of the situation, but they have to manage to deliver a ground-breaking - no pun related to Dalamud - new client...

This can be alleviated by server mergers. ideally this does not need to happen. if anything we want them to have to add new servers.

there's quite a bit of hype around 2.0. I've seen a lot of people come back to the game (myself and two close friends of mine included) and i've seen a number of new players on my server. I don't know what it is like on other servers, but in general i think most servers got a very small boost to their population over the last month or two.

the problem won't be getting new people to come in. the problem is getting them to stay.

I quit for a variety of reasons. and i came back because the problems were fixed. with the game as it is, there are three major issues.

Need to haves:

1) More endgame content. (there is some, but we're basically restricted to working on relic, primals, SBing. FFXI nailed this. between the expansions there was tons of stuff to do. and unlike some other games, the gear from each of these contents was still useful years later. not to mention most of it was just fun to do.)
2) Latency (everyone knows about this one already, supposedly alleviated in 2.0)
3) the UI/engine (to be fixed come 2.0)

the nice to have will be

a) more classes/jobs
b) more variety to low/mid level gear
c) low/mid level content. (powering to 50 is too easy atm. so i don't think this is a 'must have.' and the main scenario story will really take care of this come 2.0)
d) Improvements to power scaling (revamp of materia system and more viable replacements)
d1) Improvements to battle formulas. less focus on dLVL. (it's hard to replace +30 str on gloves, simply because no other gear can get near it. but the reason you need such a ridiculous amount of +str on one piece is because of how damage is dealt and recieved.) It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that we can take on Ifrit/Garuda (which i classify as lesser deities) with 8 people but it would take the entire server to take down a lvl 99 rainbow basilisk/goblin. apparently goblins are stronger than gods. >.>