Highly Notorious Monsters

[Alhanelem]

Don't have every HNM exist in the open world. Make some Instanced.

All or nothing, as far as I'm concerned. This statement doesn't address the problem. FFXI had both world spawns and popped HNMs.
FFXIV does have 'instances' that are in the normal world area. I'd be fine with that system being leveraged. Anything that doesn't deny other players who want to the chance to participate in content is fine in my book.

You should never eliminate content that so many obviously have interest in solely due to the fact that someone may find a way to exploit the systems flaws.

The forum-goers are not wholly representative of the entire playerbase. even most of the people posting in support of this thread don't support world spawn HNMs. Far more people are looking for something like BCNMs.

Crafting was being botted, Square-Enix found a way to fix that exploit.

Part of the reason I'm not a big fan of crafting. it's hard for it to be beneficial unless you do it all day or you bot so you can control the market. It's gotten a lot better lately though, i'll give it that.

IMO, if you want to be competitive, then you should be doing PvP when it comes out. Competition should be kept out of PvE except as it pertains to who gets what loot when your group kills something.

Driving a stake through the heart of a game would be not listening to a large mass of people who are calling for the implementation of HNM's

It's not a "large mass" of people that want to play HNMs. This thread, while long, is mostly a handful of people talking back and forth. that's not a "mass of people." Even if every post in this thread were made by a seperate person, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the total playerbase.

Please don't assume that just because a thread has X number of posts on the forums, that everybody wants it. On top of that, not everyone in this thread wants the same thing.

Some people want BCNMs.
Some people want force pop NMs.
Some people want something else.

These should all be treated as seperate topics, not lumped under an umbrella and called HNMs. Those things above are not HNMs.