Quote Originally Posted by Daniolaut View Post
If Crafting and Gathering becomes dumbed down to point and click like FFXI and every other MMO, I will no longer have any desire to play this game.

Everything being easy and accessible, also turns everything meaningless, unfulfilling, and absolutely un-engaging.

There is no journey, there is no experience, there is just you pressing buttons and getting meaningless things. Some people can be artificially sated by such nonsense, most people in fact, but I dont play Final Fantasy for that kind of satisfaction, I play it because normally it has depth, thought, quality, and richness. FFXIV is beginning to seriously lack those qualities in exchange for instant meaningless gratification.

While the story is still good, the fact that everything is so trivial, and the playerbase has become nigh unbearable at either spectrum, the story cannot float this boat for me.
FFXIV is effectively becoming the worst Final Fantasy game in the series. And sorry popularity does not mean quality. In fact, popularity normally means the exact opposite.
Presumably SE has numbers on how many people engage with crafting and they aren't happy with how low it is. IIRC that's why we got the Ixal beast tribe, to try and help boost the number of people who engaged with crafting. So it's probably also why they made Moogles and Namazu even easier, and made crafter EXP silly easy to get, and now made crafts almost difficult to fail at by upping the success rates of abilities, and made it so you don't need to be an omni-crafter.

If you want content like the Ishgard restoration that is crafting focused, then I think SE needs to be able to justify adding that content by increasing the number of people who can do it, which means making crafting more accessible and less of a time sink.