Nobody will admit it since everyone here drinks SE's kool-aid, but SE has been notorious for prolonging their content with ridiculous drop rates and 'grindy' content, more so than many of their contemporaries in the MMO industry.

Yes, it's a MMO but the trick is to make it wide enough so that people don't feel like they are on a treadmill and forced to grind repeatedly to get to the next level of 'lootz.'

The problem with focusing on theme-park and by extension a gear treadmill in the manner that Yoshida does is that it forces repetitive grinds because if they don't, they run out of content very fast. Conversely, by forcing a grind like they do now, people get fed up with the repetitive nature of running something hundreds of times and their interest wanes.

I could go on but you see what the over-arching problem is here? Its the same problem that hampered every big name MMO in recent times. Strictly end-game based progression, gear treadmills, and Mc-Content outside of the end-game that gets old very fast. There has to be more to a MMO than grinding up seals/currency/tomes for gear just so you can do it all over again. There has to be a sense of adventure and wonderment, a sense of exploration. If someone told me back in 1999-2004 that I could explore the entirety of a MMO world in a single day and level up to cap in a week I would have laughed at said person. As much as people hate FFXI nowadays and for all its warts, there was a balance to the madness. Everything was spread out throughout the course of the game in a manner that provoked a sense of wonder and it never funneled everybody to cap which is a large portion of the problem. Yes XI forced a level grind, but it balanced out with the end-game content, the exploration, the sub-jobs, the horizontal gear structure and much much more.

To each his own, but my idea of fun is not logging on, grinding out my dailies for seals and logging out. Yeah, my style of MMO-gamer is a dying breed, but I do feel like the top-heavy nature of most MMO's nowadays, not just XIV, seriously harms the longevity of a game and its ability to stay fresh.

Edit: Sneakaboo pretty much said what I wanted to say in a much more concise manner. +1 Sneak.