I just don't get it.

[Deuce]

It seems your issue is with gear longevity, 6 months for ilvl raise is how it's done around here.

See, this statement is a perfect example of what is wrong with this community. Too many players accept a poorly thought-out design concept as being okay. "It's how things work, so just accept it." Did players accept a terribly designed game when it was released? If you can't figure out what I'm referring to, then I'll help you. I'm talking about FFXIV. When it was launched we didn't accept it as, "it's how it done." Even though Tanaka may have tried that line on us quite a few times, especially during the Beta. The game was a failure that quickly became a meme and a joke in the MMO community. It failed publicly, it failed internally, and it failed financially. Square Enix themselves claimed that it severely 'damaged the Final Fantasy brand' and the company as a whole.

Criticizing A Realm Reborn for its constant vertical climb and rapidly increasing item levels is a perfectly valid criticism. This is an issue that is impacting the game's success right now.

The fact that we can predict things is because the producer makes live letters, explaining what is happening with the game constantly.

Actually, the game has become predictable because the development team chooses to copy and paste their established design philosophies, which are quite narrow. We know now, after two years of the same, that we will receive, linear dungeons, four 'raids' every 6 months, that are hardly raids, one 24-man snoozefest dungeon every 6 months, a primal fight each patch, which is heavily scripted, some uninspired daily quests, and possibly one new idea.

About the only thing that we are unable to predict these days are QoL adjustments, buffs/nerfs to jobs, and some minor tweaks to already existing content. These are about the only things that we are unable to currently predict about this game's path moving forward. The live letters merely serve to fill in some of the finer details about what we can predict, while answering some questions. Nevermind the fact that they're generally softballs about glamour and whether or not the box in your house is going to be able to fly next patch. Anyone who has been around since the live letters started in 2011 can tell you that they've gone down in quality significantly. Production quality may be up, but the actual quality of information has gone down.

Most other games don't even tell you who the producer is let alone communicates with it's playerbase... so if you were wondering how we know when stuff get's released it's through him.

That's great, but this community now treats Yoshida as a celebrity, a person who can do no wrong. His ideas and concepts are infallible. No matter how poorly the community reacts to them, Alexander Gordias, Lord of Verminion, and the 3.0 relic, only to name a few, players will come out of the woodwork in an effort to defend him. If anyone wants to start picking their games based on celebrities then may I suggest Clash of Clans? I heard they have this well-known supermodel who is the face of their game. Certainly that must be a higher quality game because of her noteworthiness, right?

To be honest, I don't care whether or not I know who the producer of this game is. And to say that other games don't tell you who their producers are is flat out wrong. Other developers just choose not shove that person in your face because they know ultimately you only should care about the game itself.