state of the game

[Imoen]

Ok, I'm just going to lay it on you thick. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not liking aspects of the game.

However; if you are giving feedback, in the negative sense (which is fine, actually, very useful) Try to frame it in a way that doesn't sound like you are taking a direct crap on the people passionate about giving you such content. Words like "destroyed" "ruined" "failed" "screwed up" "way to listen to the community" etc... If you were on the team, how would that make your morale, reading that? Doesn't exactly make you want to jump to action!.. Paid or not, devs are humans.

Companies are about making money, and everyone needs to make a living, but the devs wouldn't be doing what they are doing if they didn't give a crap about making something good. Please try to remember that, at the end of the day, it is a business, but at the ground level, in the trenches, the guys making the stuff, WANT to give you a great experience. Quite honestly it's insulting that gamers often think otherwise. "LAZY devs" (hear this all the time...) which is funny because As a dev, everyone I KNOW, gives me crap for ALWAYS WORKING, because I care. There is quite honestly more work always, and never enough time, ever.

Anyway, your concerns and grievances are valid. Just please try to remember that most people making the game you are playing, actually do give a crap about what they are making, and DO read the forums. I'm not telling you to be complacent in your dissatisfaction, just be aware of that fact.

[Zafrei]

"Mid-core" content. Highly subjective term. I'd say EX primals would be considered "mid-core" by a lot of the playerbase.

Don't assume they make this stuff up as they go along - the entire reason for normal and savage modes is that they have data that tells them who is clearing what, and where the majority of the playerbase rest in terms of skill level. The decisions they make are informed by the data they have.

[NefarioCall]

hmmm... The game is what it is, and not what it isn't.

It is the finest post WoW style MMO hands down, and frankly, wipes the floor on quality in many areas.
It is not Final Fantasy XI, or EVE.

That said, the standard patch content rotation will be 4 years deep by the release of 4.0, and that content is plenty deep at this point. The game can continue as is, but i am hopeful that some risks are taken with the expansion to widen the scope of the gameplay.

[Esp]

This sounds more like "what I hate about the game" rather then explaining about it's current state. However, there are other threads that have explained each of these complaints in much better fashion.

[Riardon]

It's mostly due to older players getting bored. Sure there are some areas which damaged like the raid thing. Raid vanished. Think only Japan clears it now and even Yoshi stated that the Japanese do not care about the gear and rewards and like to clear the content just for the fun of clearing it. West doesn't work like this and Yoshi failed in this regard. The game is still healthy and kicking. Also if you expect that the game will evolve into the old school open world sandbox games then you are playing the wrong game. This game is supposed to cater a more casual audience who like to play this game few hours per week. It's supposed to rival WoW and not for example EVE or XI or any of the Korean hardcore grind on the open map and get KO'ed by another player MMORPGs. That being said this game has still a lot of things waiting to be done or improved. In few days when 4.0 will be revealed and excitement will be back.

[Kaurie]

A few quick points.

One, you can edit your original post to bypass the 1000 word limit.

Two, I'd recommend making separate posts for separate topics (i.e. 1 topic for melds, 1 for crafting etc), so that you can have focused discussion. With posting everything in 1 thread, it's likely to either be a) ignored, or b) focused on one of the many points you have

Third, in terms of your content, I can't say I agree with specifics, but I agree with some overall themes.

Heavensward, in my opinion, messed things up with making rotations as complicated as they are. It limits their ability to have interesting mechanics and content. Further, it widened the gap between the good and bad players so much that duty finder became more toxic. Players, such as myself, do roulettes way less than before, and often only do it with friends. I also feel that they failed on AST, while some parts of it are great (cards etc), having it just have a stance dance between SCH/WHM mode, makes it feel like it has less of an identity and that it's not its own healer.

I disagree that Heavensward got rid of the midcore community. I don't think that Heavensward has really done any worse job on this, than A Realm Reborn. I say this only after we now have all of our raid tiers. Gordias was definitely hard on the community. I think that they can do a lot more to appease the midcore crowd, but they've shown a lack of interest in putting limited development resources to this.

I honestly have very little feedback for crafting, gathering, melding and PvP. I like that melds were added to main gear, but I still feel it was done poorly. This is mostly because the secondary stat system is still god-awful. I've always disliked crafting, gathering and PvP in this game, so as I said, I have very little input.

[Marcellus_Cassius]

Deleted. \o/

[thunderbreak]

Creativity drought. Extending F2P business practice. This is what I'm seeing.

[Yukiko]

(..) after everything they build up in the 2.x series, they are running it into the ground.

It seems Square Enix is milking FFXIV...

True, buying servers is expensive and very expensive when we look at how stable they are now (seen blizzard servers struggle more often!), but somehow it FEELS like they do not have the money for enough manpower and/or supporting the game development. If we look at mogstation and how expensive the stuff there is you have to ask how their calculations look like...

[Phireblast]

People need to understand the difference between a "failure" and a "disappointment".

A failure means something didn't accomplish it's goal in any way whatsoever. This is what you're trying to say OP, and that I disagree with. Heavensward didn't "fail". It's still holding enough subs to keep the game going, which is pretty much the end all goal for SE with this game. Whether we like the game or not doesn't change the fact whether it is or isn't a commercial success. The word you're looking for is something akin to a "disappointment" which is something that I can actually agree with you about. The game didn't change the formula, and it seems we're going to be getting the same thing in 4.0 which annoys me greatly.

So yeah, HW didn't fail. It just didn't impress you(and many of us). As long as it doesn't fail, we're going to be seeing the same things for the next few years. And that bothers me a lot.