Expansion is only temporarily enjoyable. Fails to fix all main flaws.

[Reinha]

I admit, it stung hard seeing people with Hive weapons and max geared while I wasn't. My competitive nature urged me to do the same shit again, but playing the story at my own pace made me see how free I was playing. People in my LS and free company were farming Ravana EX by like the 3rd day of early access. Now I see how SE played it real safe. No I am not calling them lazy. I know they worked their asses off, but I already got through the best part of the expansion in my eyes. Soon we will get a new Crystal Tower, Syrcus Tower, World of Darkness with more of the same formula, and a new relic weapon to go through hell with. There is no real fundamental change.

My experience is that the majority of people in MMOs want the best gear to come from challenging group content so I don't see FFXIV's model changing anytime soon. Adding ranked pvp would be one way of adding variety to group content but I believe a lot of competitive raiders would be unhappy about having to pvp to speed up gearing. Open world content would have to be competitive (tagged by 1 group, long respawn, changing location) to not be too easy and to not resemble the existing format of raids, and people already complain about the open-tag hunts being too exclusive... This is why I think that dungeons, trials and raids will remain the primary source of gear or currency in the future.

After playing during 4 different expansions of WoW, I've reached the same casual mindset as you. (This is a subjective feeling about the subject so don't take offense people!) It's exciting to be a part of the first wave of progress each time new group content is released, but after I witnessed a few gear resets i.e. expansions I realized how superficial the competition for the newest and best gear was. There will always be another raid, another dungeon, another trial and another gear vendor, and it's like a neverending treadmill of killing enemies for bounty which will eventually be rendered worthless. I ended up quitting my raid team in WoW and it felt really relieving to not have to make time for raiding and to keep my gear in shape.

Nowadays I don't mind taking my time leveling, reading quest text and doing things that don't advance my character, because in the end I pay to be entertained. I focus on lasting things like the story experience, titles, pets, mounts, class leveling and getting money for housing. I saw a fc message a few days back telling people to get ready for Alexander and I was genuinely happy I didn't have to hurry to finish questing and to get gear. It's hard to let go of the competitive attitude at first but in the end it's worth it to some people.

I'm very happy I found FFXIV as it offers a casual story based experience that I've enjoyed from the start. There's grinds, easy group content and world content but also challenging stuff for those days I'm in the mood for it. However, I understand that this might not be enough for the more competitive players. Those who would like bigger amounts of raid content might be better off looking for different games to play on the side. (WoW still makes top quality raids, for example.) The resources of the dev team are limited after all and they will probably continue creating a lot of casual content, just like they have for the past 2 years, in order to maintain their core audience. As a poster on the first page said, it's a conscious design choice made to attract a certain gamer crowd, not a flaw.