Quote Originally Posted by Renik View Post
Well it gives more balance work to the dev team, but this is not for us to worry about, limiting the game because it could lead to more balancing work doesn't seems logic for me, we should worry about having fun, it's their job making it possible.

I think we agree about having specialized stats w/o making them mandatory and everlasting, they just have to find the perfect balance, and that's their job.

About the other topic, well this is more about personal opinions and experiences than feedback, just wanted to say that even if the player-base is still growing, it could be even bigger by retaining more players.
The fact is that the more complex a stat/gear system, the harder it is to balance. Warcraft, when first released was an incredibly complex game that had many class imbalances. This led to some classes like ret paladins and shadow priests having as much as 20% lower dps than other classes and no guild would take them into a raid. if you realize, the classes in ffxiv are mostly well balanced (aside from blm which was fixed). Wow struggled with this problem all the way up to patch 4.0 where they homogenized the classes. Not saying it cannot be done, but its really much harder than it sounds, especially if you have to balance pvp around it as well.

Quote Originally Posted by Fendred View Post
Just to clarify, FFXIV 1.0 was not shafted due to its complexity or difficulty. It was shafted because the game was released in an early beta/late alpha state instead of as a finished product.
Not entirely true. All we can say for certain that the game was discontinued because of its inability to attract enough players to stay afloat. The cause of why there was a lack of players/players left cannot be ascertained.

Case in point: If the game was still in beta but somehow manage to retain the subscription rate of ARR, we would still be playing 1.0 today.