Ever since AF+1 seals have been released and obtainable from quests, I've accepted that the drop rate is around the same for each quest, as well as which seal you get is random. This doesn't seem like a bad system, but it the real imbalance comes in the difficulty and time consumption in each individual quest itself.
Which is why when I saw this Q/A I became really confused....
Q: While helping out the embattled survivors of Abyssea is reward enough for this altruistic adventurer, those I assist never seem to reward me with the Empyrean upgrade seals I seek. Is it just me or is there an imbalance in the rate of yield?
A: We have confirmed that the yield rate of the seals in question is uniform, and this has been verified in subsequent testing. As is the nature of probability, however, some deviation may occur in the short-term. We ask for your understanding in this matter, and fervently hope that you never cease lending your aid to the needy folk of Abyssea.
Now earlier, a twitter message from FFIX_EN I saw this message
We've received a lot of feedback asking for a better balancing of the seal rewards for Abyssea quests
I'm wondering if the FFXI team misinterpreted what people were having a problem with, and that is the relation between quest difficulty and quest reward rate.
Let me give an example of the wide imbalance in quest time consumption and difficulty within abyssea:
1. Smoke over the Coast- For this quest, one may simply buy multiple stacks of galkan sausage on the auction house, and repeat the quest, taking around 2 minutes per turn in.
2. An Offer You Can't Refuse- For this quest, Obtain a Piece of Malachite and turn it in to the starting NPC. This can either be obtained through a) Finding one in a gold chest b) having one drop off one of five different NMs in the Abyssea- Attowha zone. The rate that you can find these from gold chests is rather low even if you do have the quest, and I have also only seen one Malachite drop from at least 10+ of the monsters that can drop them.... This quest would take probably at least half an hour or so per turn in at the least if you tried to spam it, and that is being generous. You would have to first farm amber lights to see gold chests drop at a decent rate, then get lucky enough to find one in a chest. And I'm noting that these Malachite are Rare/Ex, and npc for 5k gold
THIS is where the major imbalance in seal quests comes in. I don't see why each quest should have an equal seal drop rate if one quest may take a small fraction of the time to complete that another one does. There are several seal quests in abyssea that require a large amount of time and effort to spam, and it seems very unfair that if you want the seal that drops from this quest, you are set at a major disadvantage.