What is this I don't even...

[Abriael]

I believe the article describes fairly well how people who aren't FF fans will feel when they try the game

Actually most casual gamers can't really care the less about the minutiae the writers complained about.

Contrary to popular belief most people out there don't get all bent out of shape because they have to drag an item from a window to the other, or because the map is split or things like those.

While some streamlining can definitely be done, what makes a game good or bad goes definitely a lot beyond that, which makes this preview simply not a preview, but a long rant over small and mostly irrelevant things, raising the question on why the writer goes so much out of her way (and out of the topic of a preview) to desperately find some stuff to bash.

Edit: It really comes down to this, as Ben Kuchera wrote:

Ben Kuchera simply is quite refractary to criticism. He's always been. He found his site on the receiving end for once and couldn't take it.

The vast majority of comments are well written and well argumented. People responded to his "question" on what they like about the game even before he asked it. But of course he decided to "judge" the whole community over the few that were out of line (after the writer did whatever she could to provoke heated reactions with her hyperbolic and sensationalist wording, mind you), like they somehow had the sacred duty to write ten paragraphs of commentary while expressing their displeasure about an article.

Well. That's not how it works. The readers of a site are basically its customers, and if the customer thinks a product is bad, he's plenty entitled to express it without being held to the responsibility of explaining why. It's better if he does, but it's not his duty.

Ultimately, his message is "don't dare criticize us, and even if you do, you're hardcore fanboys so what you say doesn't matter".

When an article causes severe negative reactions, a good writer (and especially a good editor that greenlighted that article, as the responsibility is mainly his) asks himself what's wrong with the article, not what's wrong with the readers.

Lol so funny.
Someone writes something negative about FF and the first thing that people do is attacking another game, in that case GW2.

The writer's the one that brought up GW2 actually, and in a quite improper way at it.