I want to play *This* game

[Colt47]

Guess I will elaborate on what OP is trying to say right now because it applies rather heavily to a lot of different design directions taken by the team over there...

So back before savage kind of grew and more people started doing the content, the game was a lot more about getting to know and do interesting things with a class / job. Snaring mobs, using the right debuffs and buffs to survive specific situations, managing emnity using skills like smokescreen, and flipping between modes with jobs like healer stance. The game has now moved more to just being a rhythm game with no variation. This really limits the developers outside instances like bazja and eureka on what they can do to make fights interesting, so they just tighten numbers now and make basically the same thing over and over again each patch. No matter how dedicated a fan is to the game, we can at least all agree that people are going to get bored doing the same thing over and over, right?

And what is probably the most interesting thing is that even though making the jobs easier to learn is a thing with this new rhythm based system, people are still getting shoehorned into specific classes. Primarily, this is because the game still pushes competency through having harder content like savage, which shapes the community around it. They can hide the ugliness "officially" by not endorsing or creating damage meters and other tools, but people create them anyway so it is unavoidable.

The other issue is the game is just about being a second job at this point. Someone could literally come back in two years for the next expansion and miss nothing of importance. Oh, they missed out on savage tiers and special hidden bosses? Well I guess they can just go unsync in the next expansion and literally blow through it with a week of time without even a sliver of the competency the hardcore raiding community touts as a requirement. Missed the Criterion dungeon when it was current? Well congratulations the entire thing is solo-able anyway and has absolutely nothing of value except maybe a mount for collectors.

Is anyone really missing anything important in FFXIV if they didn't do island sanctuary? Is it really worth it to have to spend hours upon hours doing crafting when all someone does is ultimately press a preset number of buttons with an RNG generator? There's just way too much grinding for some meager reward and while our energy wanes going forward, the energy needed to get the rewards drops considerably and underplays the effort the player put in to begin with. And FYI this final statement applies to just about most MMOs right now.