SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Avarghaladion]

In general, I haven't seen most people wanting things to be made that complex... just any sort of change to give the gameplay even the slightest bit more depth. The game has potential and there's a good foundation but there's just not enough here to run a decade of status quo additions. I can't think of a more simplistic MMO in regards to virtually every aspect of the game. The areas where they do try to add complexity are silly (ie. colouring your choco, changing the appearance of your equipped gear, dying certain gear). It plays kinda like a last-gen, single-player hack 'n slash only with every fight being completely identical every time you run it and with less than half the content. Of course people aren't going to have ongoing appreciation for that, especially not when they're paying a minimum of ~$144/yr for it (forcibly so if they own housing and don't want to lose it). We pay way more for this than any number of big budget titles and SE's quality control is quasi-existent, at best.

Also, I believe your statement here is very inaccurate:

Now lets jump to FFXIV, while its not perfect in it's own right, it does go out of it's way to explain and teach a new player what you are, what your role is, and not throw you out there with a sword and be like "Okay do something!". Having no sense of direction is just as bad as too much direction. People even complained in 1.xx that the sense of direction was near non-existent, and a beginning tutorial would of helped.

If SE did such a fantastic job of teaching people their roles in XIV there wouldn't be i110 players with no idea how to fulfill their roles' basic requirements, let alone how to optimize those roles in a very simplistic game. I feel your perspective here is coloured by the fact that you're personally a more experienced gamer in the MMO realm now, so you can catch onto things faster. XIV does provide "direction" in the form of the extensive hand-holding quest chains, but it certainly doesn't provide any more guidance than XI or any other MMO. Even the class/job quests that are designed to test one's ability to apply what they've learned just pump players full of echo until they clear them.

Finally, the "here's a sword, enjoy your adventure" approach is a bit of RPG flavour whereas XIV is very very much an extreme case of a traditionally scripted JRPG to the point where there is zero customization and the path is essentially linear. I suspect the reason they chose to follow a more western RPG model in the past has been due to its ability to grant longevity and diversity to a long-running title. XIV is almost 100% pure JRPG. Pretty bold move but as everyone and the dev's are gradually realizing, making content in a totally linear system you're trying to draw out for years and years and years and years is a real whore. They're utterly dependent on every cheesy method under the sun to stall the playerbase as much as possible and as frequently as possible in pretty much every facet of gameplay.