Quote Originally Posted by Quuoooote View Post
As an aside, I hope people in general are able to move past this "casual vs. hardcore" dichotomy to recognize that content is being stretched thin for everyone, and infighting over who has it better is reductive.
I completely agree with your last paragraph. As a raider it's a bit funny seeing people on the forums and on SNS talking about how the game is losing appeal to casual audiences and is choosing to appeal to the 5% of hardcore players. I think a lot of things they've added are wonderful and there are many moves towards the right direction but slow updates and drip feeding content make the game difficult to enjoy.

People knew PCT was too strong even before the tier came out, but the devs completely ignored it until it was too late, and chose not to make any meaningful balance changes before the release of FRU. If it's balanced to be a decently challenging DPS check with a PCT, it'll be torture for a party without one. If it's balanced to be a decent DPS check without a PCT, it's going to be shredded in a party with one.

On top of this, the data center travel restrictions have made raiding on NA servers awful for anyone not on Aether. It's obvious to anyone with eyes that the player numbers have died down since the release of DT, is there any reason why Aether is still locked down? Parties are nearly nonexistent on other DCs, and it seems like the only way you can get on the server is to log in at completely ungodly hours. It's great that they fixed the login issues at launch, but if they're not going to have any timely response to lower player numbers and leave this frustrating system in place when there's no more need for it, I'd rather just deal with the long queues for a couple weeks after launch rather than have to wait on the dev team to remove restrictions months after release.

Also this is old news, but weekly loot lockouts and how long it takes for a tier to be unlocked are ridiculous. Raiders who love savage WANT to raid. They want to help their friends and do the fights on repeat but can't because they'll ruin the loot drops. By the time the tier is unlocked, hardcore players are already bored because they've been doing the same fights for what, 5 months? The game actively restricts your ability to play the game to the extent that you want until it's so old that nobody even cares to do it anymore. You are actively discouraged from playing the game when you want to play it, and only allowed to play to your hearts content long after everyone's already lost interest. Tome caps are also a pain. These things have been around since the beginning of the game, but with the extended gaps between patches now, and with the lack of meaningful, active, and repeatable content, these restrictions are more frustrating than ever.