Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Marxam]

I would have to agree they are out of touch. Ive played since beta and honestly I am tiring of the same formula each patch. They are afraid to take risks on content, it’s a bit ridiculous that we have to wait 1-2 months after a patch (4.3) to get Heaven in High and the Eureka Pagos...The communication is never very good either, how bout a road map for content? What happened to blitz all? What happened to Ishgard housing?? At this rate I can’t inagine people will wait around doing the same things in the game hoping for something else...guess we will see.

Well they went from designing an engaging game to a watered-down theme park. I refuse to believe that Yoshi P or really any legacy game developer is out of touch but rather they are fully aware of their situation and as a business create products to entice excessive purchases from players. Things like dyes, exclusive mounts, retainers, etc. are only a few examples. I've been playing since 2.0 beta and what sold me on the game at the time was that it was fun engaging and I felt like progress actually mattered. Things like Coil or relics and just the general difficulty of the game in the vanilla form was exciting. I remember having to stop outside of demon wall just to formulate a plan of attack. That sense of teamwork is non-existent outside of savage raids which makes this game feel so empty now. No sense of achievement because there was no adversity to overcome and that's what killed it for me.

However I'm already sobering up to the fact that I feel like SE is set on turning FFXIV from a cash cow to a cash farm and any semblance of player experience is almost out the door. It's far more obvious now with patches feeling more and more empty, content spaced out even farther within patches, and adding a dye option to gear introduced in a previous patch which should have been done in the first place. The latter is what irks me the most since adding the ability to dye is now considered mandatory among the playerbase given how huge glamours are. I'm always pissed to get a sweet looking gear only to find out it can't be dyed but a few patches later it can be.

I digress, but I personally don't think that the FFXIV team is out of touch but rather are fully aware of what they are doing and we are all just addicted to it. Once my 3 months are up (which I sorely regret buying) I will have to seriously consider what to do with this game I used to enjoy playing.