Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Seems they already started the upgrade campaign for PS3 > PS4. It lasts until December 2017(so a year+). Can pickup old PS3 copies of the game for cheap and upgrade to PS4 for not much, that said you'd still need Heavensward after(and evenually Stormblood too) so not as useful anymore.

I'm not sure all of these are tied to PS3, especially stuff like inventory and towns, that sounds like server issues(the towns not sure maybe some spaghetti code in there, heavensward has areas that are way way bigger than cities and Ishgard itself is split into 2 but each area is like larger than Uldah combined it feels like). Minion+chocobo I'm not sure what's the issue, you mean like the cosmetics pets shit? The only issue with chocobo I remember is having them out+mounting but they fixed that in Heavensward.

I think mostly it's gonna be a matter of letting them do larger rooms with more stuff going on during boss fights, and develop on world boss content like hunts or the treasure hunt island exploration shit they added in HW. PS3 really couldn't handle shit with a lot of people, so they had to tone down some aspects of it, like amount of mobs, mob abilities and loot availability.

is the GCD still 2.5 sec? That killed the game every time I tried it for me. Combat felt always super slow and waiiit-for-it . I would love to play FF XIV but after the DDR-pace WOW has nowadays I would last 10 mins after leaving the city

I highly doubt overhauling the battle system means reducing the GCD, the GCD works fine and is helpful for gamepad support I think. It'd be a change to try to please some people that didn't like the game at the risk of displeasing many current players, a gamble that probably wouldn't be worth it. People who want faster gameplay play other games already.

The overhaul will probably be more like reworking rotations, cutting some skills to reduce bloat and adding better UI support for stuff to maintain your rotation more easily(especially temp buffs like the dragoon buff they mentionned already or black mage enochian or whatever else). They might also rework some class concepts, like bard/machinist. Maybe make paladins less boring again.

Not sure if that shit's still going on but they had severe issues on all NA realms with certain ISPs from what I read.