While I think the planned changes to make the leves less important sound all well and good I'd like to get some info on mechanics that have a bit more depth than what the current activities in XIV offer.
(sidenote: actually I hate all the leves with passion)
For example crafting. Why not let us hunt for our own materials ourselves?
I think it would be cool to try to find out which mobs drop the necessary material to level my (useless) Culinarian.
I think it was fun to press the crafting button for 15min/leve but for long periods of time I prefer games to have a little more depth than that.
When I was playing XI I loved how every year you keep learning more of the systems running under the hood but you weren't required to learn it all at once to get started.
I'd like all the birthdays and constellations to mean something to my gameplay experience. The storyline of the world feels a bit too "slapped on" so that all the leve texts and NPC "levescreens" seem really removed from what I'm actually doing n the game.
I'd like to bring up the example of Animal Crossing (get you palm outta your face and just listen for a sec!). That game is really accessible to everyone but there is always a TON of hidden systems going on that keeps the world feeling alive and full of surprises. For example the way the color of the flower is dependent on other plants around it and the way time is used to determine what events are happening semi-randomly around you.
It would be cool to find something unexpected even if it's not me finding them. I don't want SE to spoil all the content by making 8 public announcements about them on the Lodestone before they are in the game.
I know this is a lot to ask now that SE is more or less forced to market the living poo out of every tiny tweak they make to keep the players waiting for more but I hope in the future we'll see more of the things like the randomly spawning doomsday prophecy NPCs.
tld;r-words-confuse-me-youtube-people: RANDOM STUFF PLZ!!1! =D