lol. Why am I being called an Abyssea Defender? Abyssea gives me a headache, honestly. It's repetitive and boring at this point. The content was strung out for too long. My friends and I are beyond bloody sick of Empyrean weapons. We started an Ochain 2 months ago and still haven't bothered to go finish it.

There are not two extremes at work here, Arcon. This isn't a matter of Abyssea or RotZ Kings and nothing else. There are certain quality of life issues that the Developers have only recently begun to address, and that is in no way a bad thing (Well, aside from the fact that they're only NOW addressing them).

Teleporting to battle areas is fine. There is no real skill involved in seeing who can fleehack their way to Dragon's Aery the fastest.

Force spawning NMs is also fine. I know a lot of people made a lot of money by writing bots, but winning claims has never been an indicator of skill.

Some time sinks are okay. Assault tags? That's okay. Putting in a tag-esque system with Kis refreshing every 22 or 46 hours for new HNMs would result in the exact same time factor, just without the "Who's got the most expensive bot" bottleneck.

Some time sinks are not okay. 0.1% Drop rates? Not okay. I've gone over 0-1/100+ on more NMs than most new players can name off the top of their heads. Does that make me feel skilled? Special? Dedicated? Accomplished? No, it really doesn't. I'm not elated when I get that 1/247 drop off Poisonhand Gnagdad. I'm just less likely to throw my computer out my window. The random number generator sucks. This isn't a single player RPG, or a Korean MMO.

Likewise, this doesn't mean that things need to be Gameshark easy - there are other ways to add difficulty/rarity aside from low drop rates.

You know what SE did well? Einherjar. Einherjar was awesome. It was a quick, fun event that could be done with minimal time commitment. There was a point reward for all comers that was used to buy unique and relevant armor drops. The final boss dropped relevant Abjuration armor, with a minimum loot pool expanded by TH, as well as unique and relevant Odin-specific armor/weapons.

The entry item was used as a gil sink, and the mandatory cooldown in conjunction with the feather system served as a time sink. Einherjar was awesome.

How could SE improve on Einherjar's system? Easy. Add consumables, Temp Items, and/or Alexandrite to the Ichor list. Update the Ichor list regularly (eg, not just when they feel like upgrading Einherjar once every 5 years) with new armor pieces that are actually worth obtaining.

I realize that people used to pride themselves on how "FFXI is so much harder than WoW and thus we are all better players than anyone who plays WoW because easy games are for kids", but that tripe never had any real substance. People really need to learn to differentiate between sincere game difficulty and stockholm syndrome.

People don't need things handed out on a silver platter. I don't mind saving up 100,000 pseudo-Ichor for a Mekira Meikogi. I just don't want the sum of my progress to be either 0% or 100% at any given time. FFXI does not follow the law of averages, it follows the law of large numbers. It is theoretically sound to go 0/1 billion on Ridill and then get the next 11 million drops in a row. That should not happen in the future, and should never have happened in the first place.

I want to say that there's a middle ground here but this isn't really middle ground. A lot of old systems were shit. Some new systems aren't much better. What's in the middle of shit and shit? More Shit. So no, I don't want a middle ground. I want something good.