What is this I don't even...

[Maxwell]

This article is harmless to FFXIV. People who wanted to play will still play. Those who never wanted to play wont. MMOs cant be pictured acurately through any form of review like standard single player games can. Discerning gamers realize that easily. This article is simply a first impressions opinion piece and frankly does not deserve half the attention its getting.

Side notes:

• They were not given much time with the game as part of the media tour. And on an empty dev server most likely. Not much to build an acurate opinion on.
• I'm glad GW2 is used for comparaison. Wow is behind now. New bars have been set. We must criticize XIV for any lacks under new standards and direction.
• No, you do not breach an agreement (NDA) to which you did not expilcitly agree to be bound to. The media was given express permission to report on the current state. That was the whole purpose of the media tour.

[Abriael]

I'm glad GW2 is used for comparaison. Wow is behind now. New bars have been set. We must criticize XIV for any lacks under new standards and direction.

Wow is behind what? GW2 is already well on its way to decline (even thanks to the attempt to break the mold in a rather clumsy way only for the sake of having more bullet points to write behind the box), while wow, as much as I personally dislike it, is still sitting nicely on top of the hill, by far and still happily asking for subscriptions to boot.

No new bars have been set. Especally not by GW2. It doesn't matter anyway, as good writers preview and review games on their own pros, cons and values, not compared to others.

[Powercow]

while wow, as much as I personally dislike it, is still sitting nicely on top of the hill, by far and still happily asking for subscriptions to boot.

Well they are down to... heh, 9.6 million subscribers. But hey, the subscription model must be dead because people say it is, right?

Honestly her article came off like a person who played a small segment of the game and decided to compare it against their favorite game in the same genre... which is exactly what happened. I didn't care for the wording used in the article and she seems to have missed the point on nearly every problem she encountered. Anybody who can think about game design for a moment can spot these issues.

For example, not giving rewards to high-level players doing a low-level FATE. The reason for this is incredibly obvious to all of us, since you would spend time gearing up your alts by smashing through the low-level FATEs, which makes them incredibly boring for the newer players. Anyone who's played a game with a system like that (RIFT, for example) knows that you might be having a ton of fun with a couple other low-level people, then some level-capped epic-geared guy comes in and just kills everything instantly. He may be well-intentioned, but he ruined the fun everyone else was having.

Remember: anything that's not clearly an oversight or bug was put into the game on purpose. If you look at a game and see something in it that doesn't make sense to you or seems really stupid, try to think for a moment about why it might have been put in there. Try to guess the thought process of the developer, and if you can discern a reason or two about why they may have made that decision and you still think the thing in question is stupid despite their reasons, THEN you can say it's stupid and explain why their thought process is faulty.

This is what annoys me about this article. The author didn't even try to use critical reasoning to figure out what the intention was before jumping to a conclusion that it was wrong.

Here's an example with handing over quest items:
The article (paraphrasing):
"Handing over quest items is a pain in the ass."

How a good article would phrase it:
"Handing over quest items is intended to slow down questing and force people to read the quest dialogue. I didn't find the quests interesting enough to warrant reading them, and forcing every player to have to stop and hand over the X Bear Asses to the NPC every time I just wanted the EXP and the new shirt felt like it was dragging the pace of the game to a halt. People who are interested in reading the quest dialogue can stop and read it, the rest of us should be able to just get on with the game."
(Note: THIS EXAMPLE IS NOT MY OPINION. This is simply an example of how an opinion should be phrased if it's meant to invite discussion or give off any sort of impression that it's a reasonable statement.)

The first is just saying "X sucks." The second is saying "X was meant to do Y, but it still sucks because Z."