Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
I wouldn't call it a double standard, more someone not realizing or accepting what FFXIV is about. If someone is purely interested in combat, why play a game that straight-up markets itself as primarily a story-based MMO (one of the reasons it's frequently called an RPGMMO instead of an MMORPG). There are other games that heavily emphasize endgame raiding and see the story as just something to blow through as a means to get you to endgame. FFXIV isn't that game. It would be like playing an FPS set in WWI and being disappointed that it doesn't include modern tanks and jets.

Remember, when WoW was far and away the "best MMORPG on the market," it attained that status precisely by being more casual-oriented than other MMO's at the time. And end-game raiding at that time was practically nothing more than tank-and-spank with occasionally one other mechanic at most involved. The "hardest" part of combat was actually just managing to get 40 people together to do a raid.

There's also a direct link between WoW shifting to a "raid or die" mentality focusing on ever-more-difficult combat and eSports, and it's loss of that "best MMO" status. Put quite simply, the unofficial "best MMO of the moment" title has a long history of going to the game that is most casual-friendly and doesn't focus on "harder" normal content.
WOW is still the largest MMO, we are close but WOW still holds it, and WOW maintains that title partially because they balance their casual and endgame content and have a decent difficulty levelling curve

14 just jumps from “cure 1 spam is fine to 99% of your GCD’s must be glare or we will enrage” with absolutely no middle ground and it’s a big part of why we have such poor capped population retention