It's good that the new team is willing to scrap ideas. Clearly the original direction wasn't working. If hamlet defenses were going to turn into a generic sub-par version of XI's besieged, there's little point in walking all the way out to them and back and no point in producing more mediocre-quality content just because the idea was thrown around and sounds, at face value, somewhat interesting. All around, the planning and direction in the past has consistently been random and halfassed, with the assumption that players would lavish praise on whatever they came up with.

Hamlet defenses probably represented more content that was simply below the genre's standards in 2011. We don't need substandard content as content. We don't need par for the course content. Sooner or later this game's going to have to excel at content instead of just going through the motions of building a MMO.

People are asking what this game is trying to BE and it's a valid question. Seems like we're still just going through the motions of building an average MMO. That is nowhere near the actual expectation.

Bliz would have cancelled this project and started over, after the final assessment was that its fundamental ideas just don't have enough potential to make it a stellar game.

The XIV devs need to take the same brutal approach that everything that's mediocre needs burned to the ground and redone. I doubt hamlet defenses were very talented content.