It's just sad that the playerbase has actually resorted to using pictures to communicate with the game makers .... crayola ftw!
Clearly SE should send translators along for these events. A small group of designers was on-hand at last year's SIGGRAPH to show FF12 as a WIP - giving a very small talk on how they went about creating the game. Afterwards there was a small Q&A session ... however, with the exception of one SE staff member, none could speak more than a few words of English. The end result was getting to see alot of pretty animations and render tests, yet having no clear way to ask questions. Much as the way this interview seems to have gone.
I do doubt that the PR team knows much, if anything, about the game itself. Their job is to promote, not necessarily to answer questions. It did strke me as odd that a great number of SE's answers were of the mind-set that "we don't want to make the game easier". How is sitting in a zone for 4-6hrs waiting for a pop window hard exactly? SE's implimentation of its time-sink game mechanics doesn't increase the games difficulty in the slightest. It does however, ensure that they can be somewhat light on the amount of content they release. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking its a little more than strange for an MMORPG to release an expansion that's nowhere near complete.
Camping mobs with low drop rates bores me to tears ... as I'm sure it does many people. Thus, we must look elsewhere for entertainment value in the game - which can be a very trying and unfulfilling experience. I had hoped the latest expansion would offer new missions with an exciting storyline - yet sadly 4 months after release the series of missions available can be completed in several hours requiring little to no skill whatsoever. SE's response to this - wait a few months, maybe we'll add more, but I don't know.
For those who enjoy camping (H)NM's, it must be exceptionally frustrating that after three-four years you are still camping the exact same mobs in the exact same zones hoping for the exact same drops. Would the game truly be destroyed if a sword better than Ridill was released? or pants better than Byakko's? If so, then SE has failed miserably in its design of the game.
It was also quite disappointing to read that essentially the main reason for not implimenting instanced zones was simply that SE's servers can't handle it. This also helps to explain the extreme lag caused in both Dynamis and Besiged - adding zones with numerous players and mobs on ancient servers that can barely handle mini-instanced Assault zones (I've had several occasions where Assault was full requiring my group to wait for another group to exit) isn't good. The game is old, and showing its age more and more as the days and months go on - it would be reassuring to know that SE was actually looking at upgrading its own infrastructure rather than simply trying to find minor tweaks they can perform on aged equipment to gain a few more sales of an expansion.
Should every player in the game have every item, no - that would make the pursuit less rewarding. Should every player in the game have a chance at every item, yes - we all pay the same monthly fee and are entitled to the same content. (H)NM's with 12-72hr+ pop times are a little more than ridiculous - perhaps if there were (H)NM's that had a superior loot pool in CoP/ToAU zones this wouldn't be a big deal, people would camp the old for items, then move on to the new for items - freeing up the old for newer shells coming up. Although I'm sure that would somehow make the game "easier" and thus be wrong in the eyes of SE.
Personally, I'd like to see a series of "access" like quests that a player/shell would have to complete to be entitled to fight an HNM - sure that would get boring and repeatitive over time too, but at the completion of the quest you would be able to fight the HNM at least. It'd be nice if the access quest was more than "kill a billion of these mobs and hope to get a rare item to pop the one you really want to fight". That's simply farming, which is also boring, the quest idea adds a bit of backstory, giving a reason for players to want to fight the mob, as opposed to the current - kill it because it has a 0.0001% chance to drop the item I want. The drop rate wouldn't need to be altered necessarily, and it would be something to do rather than sitting in a zone for hours and hours hoping that your claim macro is faster than the other shell's bot. Doing something is more fun than sitting in a zone with your fingers on your claim macro -.-.