Game too complex or easy?

[Catwho]

What was hard in FFXI?

Unless you're equating hard with time consuming or needlessly convoluted.

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time (without the Tidal Talisman, getting to Einherjar required a 10 minute boat ride with a 10 minute wait if you missed, or using a consumable item to travel through a maze then running through aggressive territory, which also took about 10 minutes. Tidal Talisman cut that down to three zones and five minutes, only one zone of which had aggressive mobs.)
- Unforgiving, no do-over mechanics (you lost control of Dynamis Lord, it was all over) thanks to strategies that required 2-hour abilities
- Competition between groups for scarce resources (HNM pop claims, scheduling Dynamis zones, and rare party members)

XIV eliminates the travel time and makes building a party for any given content much less frustrating (cross-server duties in Duty Finder, and Party Finder.) Open world resources like Hunt NMs are shared and all fights are instanced so you don't need to reserve Coil Turn 9 two weeks in advance. This isn't necessarily making the game easier so much as it is removing the tedious pointless BS that is anything but actually playing the game.

What IS actually easier: XIV is considerably more forgiving about failed attempts. Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM. That was FFXI.