/Accuse @ the devs: have you set us up to fail...?

[Nedkel]

IMO the game needs to do 2 things.
1. Actually up it's difficulty curve on solo/leveling content to actually encourage the idea of improving as a player early on. Games in the past did this which contributed to there not being a visible skill level difference between casual and hardcore players and the difference between the 2 was little more than the amount of actual time they spend on the game.
2. Needs ilvl requirements on every non solo duty so that players get into the habit early of actually keeping their gear up to date or relevant for their content. Many of the DF horror stories are caused by players being horrifically undergeared for content in DF because they have not updated their gear in 10+ levels.

The time when people were willing to spend more time to play more and learn are gone forever, most of the games including the big ones focus now on simplicity and making things easy to understand (look at wow for example).
A lot of people that used to "work in game" are now adults and cant really do it anymore, if they are either bored to do it again or dont have time for that, the gaming market is full of other games that offer fun for no effort, it was different back then when there was no good games to waste time on.
Thats why the most succesful games are the easy and fast ones today, where you put no effort into learning how the game works.
Sadly, but if the game is challenging and complicated, it will simply just not be succesful in the finance perspective.

[RitsukoSonoda]

*Snip*

We also need to stop making excuses for people not just in games but irl as well. The real issue is that these kids now at least in the US have excuses made for underperformance starting at pre-school age. A majority of the players that worked at things in game in the past still do so now. The only thing that's changed is either the amount of time they actually play the game or the number of games they play at a time.

The most successful games nowadays aren't successful for being easy and fast paced. The most common factors for game success generally are Marketing (See Blizzard), Franchise (Elderscrolls, Fallout, Final Fantasy as long as the game itself isn't poorly done), Pandering to specific demographics that will repurchase the newest version of a game every year, (Sports games, to an extent Call of Duty games).

[KaldeaSahaline]

Sadly, but if the game is challenging and complicated, it will simply just not be succesful in the finance perspective.

There's a staggering difference between challenging and complicated and mindnumbingly easy and trivial.

FF14 being the latter is not good design. Nor would your first statement, but you're implying there's no in-between and that's just silly and would make IMO for a much better designed leveling structure and would also likely help the end-game not be such a culture shock to new players.