Quote Originally Posted by captainpicard View Post
1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?
1. It's ok, longer time for bigger patches is fine too.

2. Some good, some are bad, but overall it is ok. I think it is going too much toward idiotic simplicity (loss of physical level, no monster behavior, no more AoE toggle for cure spells, monster level display rather than threat rank, etc.) and elitism (rank and class requirements, crafting and gathering are now secondary classes since the story and other contents will only be available for fighting classes -- the need to have a high war/magic class, upcoming less cross-class actions/skills to equip, etc.)

3. If it keeps improving like this (patch 1.18 and 1.19 being good examples), it will do good.

4. Most likely in two to three years with the upcoming changes, see answer 3.

5. The changes are slowly going in the right direction, some are good while others are not, see answer 2.

6. I believe the focus has been right, but should keep crafting and gathering on par with war and magic classes, not as secondary to them (i.e. allow crafting classes and gathering classes to take part in some combats with their tools to take part in the story content, for example, and war and magic classes to have special actions oriented toward crafting and gathering too -- many threads have had this discussion already and it was rejected by the devs for more simplicity and more elitism).

That's how I view the changes and the direction FFXIV is going to: more mainstream unoriginal content, less experimentation to built up new standards. Sadly, everything is about money.