What's really being done with all these updates?

[Ferth]

I think SE has basically admitted that in its current state the game is not what anyone can call "finished" and so the priority is to get everything working at an acceptable level before they add more to the main stories.

As you say, the story is what draws people to FF as a series. But I think the priority right now is to make sure that everything else works well enough that people are willing to play the storylines. Once everything is working they will have years and years to add story, or atleast that's the hope.

It helps to think of it as still being in beta for now. Storylines don't need beta testing, battle systems, UI, monster interaction all need to be in working order, then the story can be expanded.

[Suetan]

I can see that people are still complaining about how this system or that system works, but it just seems like this isn't going to end. People are never really happy about an MMORPG, just look at WoW. When that game first got started it was actually challenging. Now look at it, it's nothing but a massive mob of people that gain level after level, undersell one another for items, and then they go and do raids to get better gear for PvP. The challenge has left that game, and the feeling of hey, I wonder what's going to happen next is completely gone.

I work at Wal*Mart, and when Cataclysm came out, I didn't hear ANY of the people talking about the story. They only cared about the new level cap, and what new items were going to be available. I'm afraid that this is also going to happen to FF14 because they've already greatly lowered the difficulty level of leves and made you gain more exp/sp, and now they're making it so that your physical level pretty much isn't going to matter at all.