Let me preface by saying I would appreciate if my post was at least read before being downvoted. I understand negative threads often flounder here, but I'm genuinely just looking to have a discussion

ARR has a number of strengths (Primarily from a production value standpoint) but the more I've played it and the longer I've been exposed to the direction of the game and Yoshi's standpoint and design philosophies...I can't help but feel that he's not sure what he's doing. Not that he's a poor director, but more like they don't have any clear direction for A Realm Reborn.

I'll give some examples:

The biggest is the Armory System. One of the game's major selling points. The idea is (at least how it's described on the main website) that, one, you can play every role on a single character, and two, can mix and match skills. But as we've seen at every point, they're intent on designing content lockouts (Coil once a week, Crystal Tower once a week, Extreme Primals once a week, treasure maps once a day, beastmen camps once a day) around individual characters. Not role based as would compliment this design choice. You're actually punished in a sense for making use of the Armory System in that having alt characters per class avoids the lockouts.

Additionally, the idea that classes can 'cross class' skills from other classes is greatly stunted in numerous ways. For one, classes are built around a very central rotation. It makes it hard for cross class skills to function beyond fairly generic buffs like Raging Strikes because you can never differ from the core idea of the class. In 1.0, ignoring the critical reception for a moment, the class design was built around the idea of cross classing skills. People felt that characters became too samey and ended up not caring for it, but the point is they had a vision and designed around it. In ARR, it feels like they simply disliked the armory system but felt obligated to keep it. It doesn't mesh with the game well at all.

And then you have crafting and gathering. Compared to most MMO's, these systems are really fleshed out in ARR. There's a lot of depth there. There's almost more crafting classes than battle classes, they have their own skill sets, their own gear, hundreds of recipes and materials... yet they are intent on making crafting and gathering have no place within the game. They don't want players forced into it, they feel as if they don't want players to avoid running dungeons for gear, they feel as if a strong player market promotes RMT abuse, so they've made it completely arbitrary and bypassable. Why put all of this effort into their crafting and gathering systems if they don't intend people to take full advantage of it? In my own world, if I were directing ARR, I would take this massive strength and roll with it. I would push the game heavily around crafting and gathering and player economy, simply because, hey, I have this really well done crafting and gathering aspect of my game.

And taking that further, I'll bring up Dye and Materia. Both systems that form the game's biggest fountain of potential depth and customization, both visually and mechanically. They designed these systems and advertised them heavily...but pigeonholed them into an aspect of the game they clearly don't want people to use. Both dye and materia only apply to gear that is crafted (Mostly), and since they don't want people to progress their characters with crafting and gathering, both systems are doomed to go widely unused. Why take the time to develop three massive concepts and purposely build them to be unusable? Crating, materia, and Dye together have such a massive pool of depth. The game could be designed around crafting and materia with the systems they've built and could truly work. But they didn't.

And finally I'll talk about the open world. The biggest, or second biggest complaint about the game's original release was its world design. How there wasn't much to see or do and it was visually uninteresting. So they literally made a new one...and then decided they didn't want people to play in it. They don't want players 'monopolizing' open world content, so they want everything instanced. The open world loses all meaning once you finish the story by design. I adore the open world in this game, but from mounts and teleporting, to cramped maps and numerous camps, and the complete lack of threat from mobs, the entire game's world comes off as even more sterile then its predecessor. While 1.0 was heavily copied and pasted, there were elements in its design that made it a tangible experience. Mobs were dangerous, there were rare things to hunt, you had to travel it to reach content. Why, why take the effort of making something as visually rich as ARR's open world when you don't want players to spend time in it?

Does any of this make sense? Does anyone agree? Am I the only one that feels ARR's design comes off as incredibly backwards? I'm open to discussion and appreciate any civil comments whether they agree with me or not.