Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
There is a hint of truth to this.

I had a wall of text typed out, but honestly I've rambled about it all enough times and there's no point. I love the game, it has enjoyable raids, a great story and the devs avoid things like endless treadmills and FOMO. Other games fail at this, so it's worth the sub for now. But it feels like every expansion an activity I used to enjoy is torn apart and handed over to people who didn't even like it for "accessibility" and it's frustrating. It also feels like the short term effects of handing things over to people on a plate and recent success of the game after WoW fell apart has caused a touch of arrogance to creep in and I'm seeing more of a dismissive "we know what's best" attitude.

I'm a little tired of how crafting is worthless, the DoH forums are a ghost town, Healers are rioting and told to be quiet, botting is rampant and unchecked, Hunts are an utter mess that the devs ignore and a source of player conflict, housing is a mess, class design is more watered down but they keep pumping new classes out, they keep trimming content but pour resources into other things that are just 10 minutes and done and so on.

Could be worse, but it's not perfect.
This summarizes my feelings as well. Crafting used to be something I enjoyed; having learned the systems back in Heavensward and put both time and effort into gearing up from nothing. In fact, I still have the Ironworks coat I spent all day years ago figuring out how to make.

Come Stormblood, I was okay with the slight reduction in difficulty. It felt like a fair enough compromise but Shadowbringers came along and basically ruined Crafting. It's so damn easy now that I hardly bother because what's even the point? Right now, all the gear is worth less than the white leveling gear we got at Endwalker's release. "Well, it's week eight. Of course it's cheap now!" It didn't used to be this cheap. Nowhere close. And what's worse is all Crafters will get come 6.1 is a new left side to flood and nothing else. Instead of having the augmented pieces have a crafting component, they're just a free upgrade.

So nowadays I craft for raid, craft for a few friends and hardly touch it otherwise. It's incredibly frustrating how "accessibility" matters more than people who already enjoy the content when those same people they're catering to still don't care to look at it.