Quote Originally Posted by Smokie23 View Post
I'm with you on this one. How easy to you want this game? Every patch released is making this game easier and is seriously making me turn my interests towards other games...and this would be the second time, leaving XIV. They don't fix XIV soon...I feel it will die a slow death. Might just go back to XI and play that again.
I don't know why players want everything handed to them. Lazy I guess. What fun is anything when its so simple and easy. I would go play WoW if I wanted a easy, cheesy game.
It's fun when skill is involved, but not when A: Recipes are randomly handed out, B: You can't view recipes you discover after a while, C: It takes 30 minutes or longer to craft a basic item, D: You have to go through multiple professions or through the Wards to do it, and E: You have to start from the beginning if you fail a single synthesis process.

It isn't challenging gameplay I dislike...it's challenging gameplay with high risk-low reward, numerous unexplained factors that can't all be tested by players, and arbitrary costs put into it (Shards). I appreciate shards because they sell easily, are easy to obtain, and help you start out...but you could remove them from the game because they do nothing but add another material to crafting.

SE also needs to branch out towards casual players...that was the whole reason they implemented the fatigue system. The only way they're going to financially recover from the September release flop and bad press is by making the game easy to get into, innovative, and appealing to the casual market. With WoW, Guild Wars, Rift, etc. they can't really compete unless they appeal to the casual market...when FFXI was released, there wasn't much competition for the MMORPG market, but now there's an overabundance of MMOs and most of them are crap (but there are some good ones).

TLDR; Just because you like "hardcore" gameplay does not mean it's healthy for the game to keep arbitrarily complex systems in the game as they are with no tweaks.