What is FFXIV trying to BE?

[gifthorse]

And another thing, we were given crafting classes with the promise of being able to play out a role as those classes. But the trouble is the crafting classes were implemented so half-heartedly that the original promise seems to be unfulfilled. I mean, how can you be a merchant, peddling your wares, when you can't even set up a shop or vendor in the street? Instead, your retainer is cordoned off into an instanced side-alley that is basically just an auction house nowadays. To be a fully fleshed out class, then shouldn't they have implemented a way for people to progress as a merchant, with the ultimate goal being to own your own shop or something?

For what it's worth, they should have just put in an auction house instead of the market wards. It all just amounts to the same thing currently.

An auction house undermines the crafting classes. The reason people want an auction house is because they consider buying/selling items to be a small part of the game and they want it to be instant. The whole crafting system however suggests that buying/selling should be a big part of the game. It's a fact of competing interests, and SE didn't really think it through.

Don't you get the feeling that everything was developed half-heartedly, with one important feature contradicting another?

Story-telling was supposed to be a big selling point off FFXIV, and yet this is an MMO, not a single player RPG, so story-telling needs to happen in a setting where multiple people can experience it. In FFXIV, however, my whole experience with the single-player storyline was by myself. Why make an MMO with so much emphasis on social-interaction if you're just going to build the entire storyline around people playing solo? Contradiction much?

We're given freedom to switch between roles, but limited to playing only one role by an hour long cool-down on point allotment. Again, a contradiction.

It's like they tried to implement all these role-playing elements so that people could play as they wished, and then tried to cram it all into a game that simultaneously wanted the opposite of that.