Genuinely, What am I missing?

[PyurBlue]

That being said, what am I missing? I want to be filled in as to why the community feels this way. I want a better perspective so I can understand I don't want pointless baseless accusations; I want statements and I want a "i feel x way because of y," or "because of x change from however many years ago." I understand some players have been playing for over 10 years (which is a lot of time!) so I will be taking longtime players thoughts and criticisms to heart the most.

A game community, or any community, is rarely homogeneous. Different parts of the community will also be more or less visible at different times. While there is a lot of dissatisfaction being expressed at the moment, there are also content players like yourself.

My opinion on FF14 is that while I've found it worth playing it has always had design choices that I've disagreed with. I would like the game to move in a direction that appeals to me without aliening the people that enjoy the game as it is but I also accept that the game can't be built around my expectations alone. Unfortunately most recent changes take the game further away from what I'd like it to be, reducing my interest in it. I don't like heavily scripted encounters, which is essentially the only combat content that the game offers. You can memorize your way through anything and that hurts replayability and content engagement. With it being such a heavy part of the game's original design it might be unrealistic to remove it completely, but I'd at least like to have some place where I can go to get less scripted content. If the content has to be scripted then it would be nice to at least have interesting and varied classes to make up for the lack of content variety, but classes have been simplified and homogenized repeatedly. Making this worse is a lack of proper difficulty balancing. Healers feel redundant especially. Tanks are now almost entirely self sufficient and I find myself forgetting to even check their HP while running content. In dungeons I barely have to heal during pulls unless the party is first timers or very casual players. Bosses are hit or miss. Some dungeons bosses do so little damage that natural regen along with passive healing is enough to cover their attacks, though even the ones that do deal damage often only need an OGCD or two. In raids the presence of a second healer makes healing requirements trivial. The higher difficult content like savage and ultimate are supposed to offer an alternative to this, but after a while they fall victim to the scripted encounter design. At this point they just feel like repeating the same thing over and over until you clear. There is no excitement of real feeling of accomplishment anymore. They also require more commitment than duty finder which you can jump into at any time. I want to have dynamic challenges that make me think and react to things in real time without needing to gather 7 other players ideally.

So my opinion of the game has become that it is too scripted, lacking interesting content, and lacking interesting classes. I don't expect new players to have the same view as often as older players do, especially those with different gameplay goals like story, or achievement hunting. I still remember my new player experience. Early game was boring due to very simple low level classes but I looked forward to endgame raiding and when I got there it was a lot of fun at first. Very quickly the scripted nature of FF14 became apparent, but I still had room to optimize my own gameplay and try new classes which were more varied at the time. This could only last so long as I learned the other classes while they were also simplified over time and nothing was done to address the lack of replayability of content itself.