Quote Originally Posted by ArchonCina View Post
FFXIV: Heavensward had a lot of different expectations set upon it by different types of players. For some of us, we understood that ARR had to play it safe in order to rebuild trust in the game and draw in new players who may not have played MMOs before. We were okay with that. When 3.0 was being discussed, the dev team mentioned that they would be more experimental and felt more confident after ARR's success. Players like myself interpreted this to mean that the training wheels would come off, and that new content would be difficult or at least would require a higher level of skill and participation than content in ARR did, and that the open world itself would also follow this model.
Honestly I took a completely different meaning from this. I was thinking they would try to break the ilvl mold and add more character depth past end game instead of this "Fashion Fantasy" we are getting. Honestly Diadem i210 is nothing to me other than more glamour sets because I don't need higher stats to complete anything in the game save A:S. In fact I was doing just fine with i190 in dungeons, open world, and VA.

Every time I hear the open world needs to be hard I just don't get it. FFXI open was hard and everyone used methods (Sneak/Invis/Hug the corners) to side-step and avoid those challenges. In fact most people found FFXI to be very frustrating in terms of trying to get anything done and ran to FFXIV 1.0 when it came out. Hence why 2.0 ARR isn't punishing players and beating them on the head to just unlock a coffer. That's not to say hard content is bad in the open world and wouldn't mind see things that requires people to group up but not the real reason things aren't going smoothly in 3.0.

What the game truly lacks is longevity goals and character depth. After 60, what else is there to do with my character? I wanted to further development past a simple base stat raise. Yoshi-P and his team really needs to draw inspiration from previously FF title as well as other MMO. FFVII had you equip materia to learn new skills. FFXI had the merit system to further augment your job. FFIX had weapons that granted you special abilities. These are the things the community is really hungry for.