Quote Originally Posted by FoxPaw View Post
Such severe game play allowed for powerful acts of altruism and true feelings of gratitude. The point I’ve been trying to illustrate is that when everything is vanilla you’ve limited the range of possible emotions.
You do realize that 'severe' games still exist right? They just aren't so popular because most people don't want to deal with that stress for what is essentially a way to relax in the evenings. In UO, for example, a death could mean losing your best gear that you spent months working on... or an invisible player could follow you into your house and loot your entire fortune. Severe, and it creates some of the best stories to come out of MMO worlds, but it isn't the sort of game most people actually want to play. It really sounds like you should be playing an MMO like Darkfall instead of FFXIV. FFXIV is designed to be a high budget, broad appeal, feature rich theme-park MMO. Part of that 'broad appeal' is that mechanics most players would find crippling are weeded out, leaving what you see as a vanilla experience. Of course, the broad appeal allows for a much higher player base and budget, so we can have pretty graphics and dungeon finder for easy grouping.

I do get it. Difficult mechanics force players to work together and communicate on a deeper level than what you get here. Even something simple like killing the duty finder, would foster that. If players had to actually talk to each other to form groups, there would be more forced socialization. Of course, if FFXIV went that route, they wouldn't be as popular and the game would have to contend with a smaller budget.

Quote Originally Posted by FoxPaw View Post
I get it, they’re not for everyone and maybe not even for me anymore but for those of you who still have 10 hours a day and unlimited fucks to give, you’re really missing out.
Exactly! There is reason I didn't stick with Archeage and never bothered even trying Darkfall. When I was a kid, with infinite time, games like that appealed to me. Now they do not. I just want a relaxing game now with enough depth to keep me interested, but not annoy me. There are games out there that strongly resemble what you remember so fondly about UO and XI. You have just decided not to play them, like the rest of us here. It would be silly to try and turn FFXIV into that. We'd just go to another 'vanilla' MMO.