Suggestions: Keeping the Game Fun

[Belhi]

Rather than answer each point individually I'll give a general point reponse.

There are basically 3 reasons which probably answer why they don't or haven't don't the stuff on your list:

1. Workload.
Simply put the amount of work required to implement the thing is either not practical (for technical reason) or requires too much investment in time to create and release within a reasonable timeframe. To implement the thing would require either longer breaks between patches or require other content to be cut. Swimming for example is something I think they would love to add and apparently in HW it was a choice between flying or swimming. Its just it takes a lot of work to implement it and then develop content for it.

2. Design choice.
There is a very clear design direction in FF14 revolving around a casual vertical progression. This system was chosen probably because it is a very popular system. FF14 is designed to appeal to the biggest playerbase possible. While multipath dungeons, Hardcore zones and limited transportation can provide deeper emersion, the large part of the player base these days (and therefore the bulk of SE's patrons) find such things too time consuming and too unrewarding. If someone can only play for an hour and a half a day they don't want to spend the 80% of that time traveling.

3. Balance.
People will often twist a implemented system to their advantage to game the system to get things as fast as possible even at the cost of fun. Its a strange dynamic but it happens all the time. People who hated grinding the same mobs on the same island for hours and hours on end for 210 gear still did it.

Making certain high level or special gear easier to get will cause people to flood to that source and ignore all others. If they handed out raid gear in dungeons, there would be a lot less people bothering with raids.

This applies to the use of things like consumables too. Changes to things like CDs can quickly throw of balance and create a situation where content is trivialised or people become required to load up on large quantities of consumables to be able to do the content.

Conclusion

There are some points you make which are actually being addressed. Its quite possible Swimming will come in the next expansion and they have said they have plans for making the GC more than just a vendor source(which is one of the reasons they still haven't raised the GC rank any further). In addition to that Yoshi P stated they are upgrading the system they use for quest mechanics to give the designers a greater choice of activities they can use in quest as the current system is very limiting on the designers. Likely we won't see much on these things though till next expac next year.

As for the rest, the game is what it is. They have designed it this way on purpose. I don't want to sound like a jerk but this isn't FF11 or even a more up to date FF11 clone. Its not going to become one either. The shift would frankly require a massive reworking that is probably just not financially feasible and would probably alienate as many people as it appealed too if not more.

On a side note though I would love an in game noticeboard for the FC. It was a feature back when I played Rift and I've always been mystified why such a simple system hasn't made it's way into other MMOs cause its so useful.