What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Absurdity]

Casual-Hardcore gap and difficulty: This expansion is, without a doubt, the easiest expansion by far. On one hand there are people who actively refuse to use their job's full kit (cryo mage, 'pure' healers etc)
and can get away with it. Yet we have savage and ultimate especially in NA more excluding than ever of anybody who doesn't have high parses and prior experience, and full of people who willingly fail mechanics in order to get their parse higher to the detriment of others parses. Not to mention the exclusion of ps4 players who can't parse and pc players who dont want to break the tos.
The msq and normal df content needs the difficulty bar raising and a proper tutorial implemented so there are less clueless starting players and max level players are unable to play without using their full kit. Parsers need to be blocked and an in game recruitment for statics instead of through reddit, discord etc.
You didn't need the parsers and other 3rd party tools in the coil people, and gordias was rushed for HW release and left there due to relic delays.

This discussion has come up a million times and will probably continue to do so for the remaining lifespan of this game.
If you get someone purposely wiping the raid because their parse is bad just boot them from the group and move on, they have no business being in clear groups.


Blocking those tools completely may not "destroy" the raiding community but it will shrink an already small part of it into obscurity. Some jobs are rather self-explanatory but for most you wouldn't even know how to utilize their full kit

Where do you think our optimal rotations come from? Continued interest in savage once people have their gear? Our BiS lists, stat priorities or substat scaling intervals?
These don't come from the devs, they don't even know how their jobs are supposed to be played themselves.

If we had no way of extracting concrete information from the game we would have to rely on "feelycraft", just freestyling everything and hoping it works. Do you think PF could beat E8S if everyone did 2k+ dps less than now?


I agree that the divide between "casuals" and "hardcore", or as I like to call it "lazy people" and "everyone else" because being casual doesn't mean you're shit at your job, is getting bigger and I would argue that it is indeed because nothing outside of Extreme, Savage and Ultimate challenges you in any way. But tools to improve have always been out there, people just need to be willing to use them and player mentality isn't something you can just "fix", especially not by dragging everyone else down to that level.


If you raise the difficulty bar for the usual max level content, forcing everyone to improve and then also take away the means for said improvement you just end up with more people quitting the game because they can't get anything done.