After playing 140+ hours of Monster Hunter tri 3 I can honestly say that that game is NOT easy!! o__O()

Oh dear lord no!

Of course the monsters have patterns that's how 99% of action games work.

It's an awesome game though. I wish crafting in XIV would be like item combination in MH3. Nobody I know enjoys the act of crafting anyway since there's nothing game-like involved in it. If the gameplay came from actually gathering the materials then you'd have all kinds of emergent gameplay even with the way XIV is now. Everybody would want to do something else than the leves to farm items and sell them forward or to craft them.

What I'd really like to see too is that some gear is like proof of your playing skill and can't be simply bought. I love my pimped up Lagicaurus gear because just by seeing that other players just know that I won't fail a simple Ludorth run by double-karting while KO'd.

I think MH also shows how inventory limitation can be a great gameplay element. I always say that bad game-designers "streamline" everything they can't design =)

Of course the ideal way to fix crafting would be to make all the jobs be different minigames, but to be honest I'm not so sure SE could pull that off given how bad the current crafting systems are. I mean SOMEBODY must have thought the current system is a good idea and he's probably in charge of designing such systems...