Today I was reading about the skinners box and conditioned responses. One thing that someone mentioned as being a reason for people quitting a game was the pause between rewards and the amount of motivation it kills until you are close to a new reward.
Gamesutra link
So this gets me to thinking... what if the reason that FF14 was poorly received was in part due to either a lack of skinner box designs that most people are used to or implemented it in a sub par way? IE the game is fine, it's the lack of dings/rewards you want that's got people down on it.
So that gets me to this point: remove said designs and just try to make the game fun on its own merits.