What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Penthea]

Lack of communication with the EU/NA playerbase.

I am completely used to this from my time in WoW. Despite the fact that the USA shares a language that most EU players speak, it was very rare for Blizzard representatives to make forum post statements in the EU forums. It was almost always in NA.

What sucked about this is in WoW server regions are segregated. You can't play on NA with an EU account and you can't post on the NA forums with an EU account. At least here if you do speak Japanese you can post on the language forum where feedback is more likely to be read directly by SE's dev team without needing to purchase a second account.

All that being said it's been a long time since I posted in the WoW forums given that I quit the game a long time ago, so maybe the forum segregation has since been removed. I hope so. It was quite frustrating to almost always have to go to the NA forums to read blue posts and be utterly unable to directly respond to them. Or at the very least I hope Blizzard now have more presence in the EU forums so that EU players can respond to their posts.

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As for what I consider are the big issues in the game:

I have seen numerous examples of players being disciplined by SE for their behaviour and when they ask the GM exactly what they did wrong, the GM responds with something along the lines of "we cannot discuss this with players" which is baffling. How are players supposed to improve their behaviour if they have to guess what they did wrong? This is so unbelievably ridiculous.

Blacklisting is pretty bad. You cannot blacklist someone unless they say or emote something in the chatbox. Which means you have to hang around and wait for that person you don't like to say or do something in your presence. This is terrible because in some cases this means players end up being exposed to more abuse instead of being able to blacklist whenever they want and entirely prevent it from happening again.

Housing availability and acquisition methods are in an abysmal state. Far better than before but still nowhere near good. The housing content itself is really good but getting a house can be such a frustrating experience that it renders many players feeling hopeless about their chances to experience that content. Some players have been trying to get their first house for literally years. It's awful.

The mentor system is a wonderful idea that is often being ruined by trash mentors. The requirements need to be higher and there should be an advanced version of the novice hall required to achieve the mentor tag (that tests more advanced mechanics like stacking, proximity aoes, passing a buff/debuff to others in the team, surviving tank busters with cds, using role actions to stun, etc). Any idiot can get classes to 80 and eventually get enough commendations. Furthermore mentors should not have so much control over the NN chat. Some are abusing their "mod" privileges to remove players who disagree with them using the chat channel as a general chat room while ignoring new players seeking help.

The game is in dire need of a fc recruitment system. Right now all that players can do in game is use the shout channel in various hubs and advertise on party finder. The fact that party finder is so often used for this just shows that the game is lacking a very useful feature.

Viera and hrothgar are absolutely shafted for head options. No hats, which means most headgear is invisible on them, and they have the lowest amount of hairstyles in the game. Especially hrothgar. And the fact that hrothgar need to fantasia to get a completely new hairstyle is beyond absurd. It's been over a year since they came to the game and ZERO updates. Not even a sneak peek of what they're working on. At this point I'm not expecting anything before 6.0

Still getting genderlocked gear. It's 2020. Let people wear what they want. So much of the genderlocked gear looks unisex which makes it even more silly.

For the love of god can we please get a way to preview mog station outfits on our characters without having to find a player who already bought the outfit so we can try it on?