Quote Originally Posted by Nemy View Post
Technically, its not a year and a half into development, since they had so much content from FFXIV, and working on an engine that should be compatible with Crystal Tools in many ways. Also nobody forced them to rebuild the game from the ground up, instead of heavily patch and expand the current one.

From a player's point of view, you have to also realise that we're not just potential customers, we are people who invested in this game in many different ways so taking away core elements of it shouldn't be made so lightly in my opinion. I really don't want to sound like a self-entitled idiot, but there is a difference here worth pointing out.
Sorry, but SE's objective right now is to not cater to a niche audience, they want to appeal to "everyone". If you are so hooked on FFXI's outdated(not saying bad) game play and concepts, well, FFXI is still up, and getting an expansion pack.

You cannot hook your audience back in just by making major fixes to the current version and say "Ohh its fixed now, come play our game!". Potential customers are not going to buy that. Now when a developer says "Hey we trashed the old game and built a completely brand new one from scratch that meets MMO standards and beyond.", I am very sure, that potential customer is more intrigued to buy the game.

Sorry, but this decision from them to completely rebuild the game play to it's core was completely necessary. A lot of ideas and requests not just from the developers, but even the "invested fans", simply cannot be done with the 1.0 engine and battle system. PvP would be a joke in 1.xx. All keeping the current battle system would do is the developers making a poor attempt to standardize an outdated feeling battle system. Also, making beautiful animations and moving around at the same time would be stupid looking.