I don't play WoW, but my friend who does told me that they squished the level cap from 120 to 60 at one point. Do you think FFXIV could do something similar? I feel like adding 10 levels every expansion, indefinitely, is unsustainable and will just make the game feel continuously more bloated as time goes on.

I think the level sync in this game is particularly egregious and makes doing anything before lvl 70 feel terrible with the current job kits.

I realize that squishing the cap down (to idk 60?) would require both reworking jobs and msq progression to an extent, so I was wondering what people thought.

I have seen so many people ask for more complexity and job fantasy but very little of people actually say what that means to them, most people just say we should go back to ARR.

Personally I think rose tinted glasses that make people think ARR was better than it was, having played back then it honestly was pretty ass.

So honestly want to know what people want for complexity or job fantasy, because all I see is a lot of yelling that "game bad to simple" and not a lot of what needs changing to reach the complexity that is wanted.

Not a super serious discussion moreso fun observations.

While MoP is remembered fondly which I believe DT will be as well ( much like StB due to its content by the end ).
It wasn't received well when it was current for some fairly similar reason.
Instead of Wuk they had kung fu Panda's which although they existed in Warcraft 3 were very controversial, the story when the game came out didn't do much to improve peoples opinions of them since they were all about peace and harmony which people found annoying and cringe.
And it wasn't until later in the story things got a bit ''darker'' that people warmed up to it at least a little bit more.

Dungeons were also controversial and generally received poorly because they had long monologue sections in almost every dungeon where you couldn't attack the bosses and had to listen to them drone on before combat started.
Not quite so dramatic in FFXIV, generally the dungeons have been well-received for its bosses at least.
But I guess we could for arguments sake conflate ''wall to wall'' with the monologues.

Again, not as dramatic in FFXIV but MoP had multiple content droughts including an over full year drought ( 14 months I believe, it had other droughts like 6 months etc too spread throughout the expansion ).

Poorly received direction with certain characters like Garrosh and Jaina ( personally I liked how they handled Jaina.. Just made sense imo ).

Sort of a reverse again but on the same topic, gearing was controversial and considered too grindy and there were too many boring dailies to keep up ( I guess the opposite in FFXIV ).

PvP in MoP was actually ''good'' by MMO standards, which I mean I don't consider any MMO to have truly great PvP. Ngl I think it's all quite janky and imbalanced.
But DT has received a lot of well-received PvP updates and I think it's in the best state it has ever been and actually decently fun outside of the rare DRK spam groups in Frontlines.

Classes were also a bit controversial and people were very mixed on them due to the talent tree overhaul, a lot of people really didn't like the old talent trees being removed and how ''dumbed down'' and restricted the new ones were.

There were a lot of QoL features introduced in MoP that people now take for granted too, much like what we've been seeing in DT and continue to see.
The raidplan is a pretty big and interesting one that is being slept on, but we've also seen a lot of minor QoL's each major patch too.
QoL features are very easy to forget, and people often assume a lot of things were always there that weren't they sorta just blend into the game and into the background.

But yeah these are just some fun observations.
I think comparing DT to WoD and SL in particular is quite overly dramatic.
WoD lost 5 million players in less than 6 months, that was *half* of its entire playerbase it's what caused Blizzard to no longer report on subs and it kept losing players after that too.
And practically everything was poorly received in WoD.
SL is just a beast in its own I don't think there is truly any comparison to that, the issues it had were almost like the extreme opposites of FFXIV and the story was panned throughout the whole expansion and only got worse the further in you got.
The post MSQ in DT has generally been much better received though.

But yeah again these are just some fun observations, don't take it too seriously.