Quote Originally Posted by gllt View Post
My implication is that the decisions that led to the current state are bad because they are the trying to keep people at any cost. No one actually wants you to unsub. They want your money no matter what they say or do.

I agree that good decisions would be a better way to keep people and I agree they aren't making them. But I still think they're make decisions to try and keep (the wrong) people. Like making healers the way they have.

Maybe it's more like this.

The FFXIV team wants to do anything it can to keep you because it's their job and the big Square boys above them need the cash to spend on more bad business decisions. And between budget constraints and trying to keep the playerbase growing at the same time while making choices that discourage some of the current veteran players, as long as it's not too much and the number of concurrent players gets higher overall and makes the number bigger for now, we get bad game design.
All is in service of big player number.

That's how I feel, hopefully that clears it up a bit.
You are correct. It's not keeping anyone at any cost. It keeps a select group of people at any cost...people who are not even IP or brand loyal and just want a dev team that will do whatever they say.