What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Provoke]

Better severs for NA/EU.
JP has far better servers. Which is why we see JP openers, JP strategies that we cannot do on NA/EU becuase it is very risky with our severs.
A little more about this here.

Will you give me an example? Not even trying to be an asshole here.

[EmmetOtter]

• More ambient sound. When I walk past a line of vendors I should hear their chatter. When I interact with a NPC there should be sound for them saying hello and goodbye (or something along those lines). If I walk in a wilderness with animals nearby I should hear them. The game feels like a silent movie most of the time.
  
• Voice acting for my own character. Its absolutely stupid that everyone else talks but all my guy can is nod.
  
• Instead of freezing our character in place and forcing me to repeatedly click through a chain of dialogue, allow me to just step away from the NPC, canceling all remaining dialogue.
  
• Quests with more emphasis on fighting and combine chained talking-only quests. What I mean by "chained talking-only quests" are: I meet up with Alphy and he talks (not "we", just "he"), 1-on-1. Next quest, go to a different town and meet with him again, 1-on-1, more talking. Repeat. If someone treated me like this in RL I would cut them off because there's no reason for that and its just wasting my time. After the 1st meet, have the next quest be "kill x enemies to get items" or "recon this area" or something. Then the next meeting with Alphy is discussing what I found with an action step after.

There's a lot I like about this game but the MSQ is just not one of them. The repeated "talk, talk, talk" chain of quests is tedious. Every quest should move the story forward somehow and having 3+ quests in a row where only someone talks at me doesn't do that. It creates a very tedious play.

[Xatsh]

IN my opinion there are a lot of things that could be improved the biggest 4 are as followed

1) Complete lack of Guild Related Content. In almost all successful mmos guilds are a center point and focus for the community. IN FFXIV the only thing they guilds are is a glorified chat channel and some minor buffs which really are insignificant. There need to be content added to encourage the formation of guilds and stuff for guilds to do together at all levels of the game begining, mid-game, and both casual/hardcore endgame. All endgame content in ffxiv is currently revolving around duty finder pug groups or static groups, this is anti-guild and needs to change.

2) Economy. FFXIV has one of the best crafting and gathering system mechanic wise in the genre... but outside of food/pots...vanity gear and making stuff for other crafters is the only thing worthwhile for crafters. The supply exceeds demand by several hundred times over. And the everyone can level everything has made it where prices fluctuate by nearly 50% on some days. In my opinion crafting gear should be equivalent to top tier raid gear. Should include crafting with really rare drops. And Gil should mean something outside houses and glamour. This would need a full overhaul though to address. I would give the crafting/gather systems in this game a 9/10. I would give the economy design a 1/10.

3) Content Life Span. It is horribly low. Major Patch cycles tend to be 4-5 months and outside some relic step content last at most 2-3 months. And all content is replaced every expansion. Simply causes a lack of stuff to do at the top end unless you are going for glamour and mounts. People running out of content that quickly is bad for retention of players.

4) Gear. It is boring. basically someone on a spread sheet dragged down to get all the main and secondary stats for each class. This is one of the worst gear systems stat wise I have ever seen in a mmo.

With all that said. these are so core ingrained in ffxiv at this point I know nothing will change about any of these.

[Barraind]

Itemization.

Near obsolescence of the dungeon system.

Severe simplification / dumbing down of healers and crafters.

Incoherent glam system.

MSQ-locking every piece of content.

Lifespan of patch cycles (last couple expansions have shown we really need the first two grindy relic / alt advancement steps of the expansion in the .5 and .25 patches)

[Wyakin]

I’d like to see better job balancing. No more ranged tax. Bring back mch ammo.

The mentor system is a joke.

Item level sync content is dumb, make content that is balanced around the current tier gear. The excuse that “it’s to allow new people to join” is dumb.

[KayRadley]

Housing, needs to be unlimited, with no 30day deconstruction. [/SIZE]

We already tried that before. That's how we got house flipping that was bloody terrible. This is why we cannot have nice things.

[Connor]

The fact that we have 17 jobs but only one role (DPS) is a pretty big issue for the game if you ask me

edit: 18 if you count Blue Mage

[Payadopa]

Boring job design that focuses solely on DPS > everything.

Boring gear that only makes a number go bigger. What even is the point?

Fast travel.