Quote Originally Posted by Nandrolone View Post
I’ve always wondered this. The FFXIV community seems to complain a lot when content is locked behind grindy effort or something that requires a lot of time and energy. But other communities ive seen, they don’t seem to complain as much. I’m not trying to start any fighting, I just never really understood why that was.
My guess would be that at least for the western community a lot of people dont come so much from other MMOs but from other FFs and they have more of an "This is a Final Fantasy game" than an "This is an MMO"-approach. This obviously effects their expectation of the game: FFs are story-heavy, story-driven games and while they can be very grindy at times, those grinds are usually tied to defeating some super-boss or just a meaningless item in your inventory. You can grind in some FFs, but if you choose not to you still gonna see most of the game and most important: Pretty much all of the story.
Most complaints about content being locked behind something that I see are in regards to story and lore being locked - sure, that glamour-thing is a nice extra-bit, but the main reason we got NMs for raids was because people who didnt want to raid were upset that they couldnt experience the coil-story-line.

Its just my personal guess ofc, but I believe that a large part of the FF-audience expects a story-heavy game and cares about having that story told to them - so they're not happy about potentially missing out on that story experience or they're more intrested in having said story told than following a mindless, potentially badly motivated grind.