Quote Originally Posted by Diavolo View Post
Viewing the issue in black and white as you just did there is why you have trouble understanding the other side of the argument.

This isn't about one person (casual or otherwise), one drop or one specific type of content. It's thousands of items given away daily, affecting everyone to some degree, both positively and negatively, like the brief examples I mentioned earlier in the thread.

If those goblin NPCs were handing items from outdated content no one plays anymore or crafted gear no one bothers making anymore that's one thing, but they've been handing out rewards from the newest areas of the game. Ask yourself, does Final Fantasy XI need to be doing this to keep its subscriber numbers up? If the answer is yes, why? I'm genuinely interested in your response.

This topic brings to mind the old proverb about giving a man a fish vs teaching him how to catch it. The dev team is giving us all a fish (or chunk of rock salt) every day.
You completely ignored that part of my post and focused on my comment on dark matter. Let me get this straight then. Adoulin dial is okay because Delve and Skirmish are outdated. But Unity is pretty much outdated too. I'm sort of with you on abjurations but I think the body abjurations were sufficiently rare to render the argument moot.

Now, as for whether FFXI needs to be doing this to maintain subscriber numbers... Who knows? I think people appreciate these campaigns not only for the free gear but also as a reassurance that the game is still alive. When the dev team comes up with something new and inventive, I like that. Maybe that thing is new content like Ambuscade, maybe it's something that's arguably worthless like the patio. Maybe it's something that a small minority will appreciate like mounts. And maybe it's a new way of giving treats to the playerbase. I don't personally need any help getting abjurations, but somebody out there was genuinely happy to get something. I ignored dark matter augments, so 6 free ones per day was amazing (and let's be real, no reasonable person was already doing dark matter augments so that didn't negatively affect anybody).

We all know the saying about giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish. How about "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." Okay, you hate the idea of a Jovian Body abjuration loading for a random person. So how would you get that person to farm Pakecet instead? Maybe instead of giving out abjurations, SE could give out NM triggers. But now I ask you, is that really going to make people do the content? It's not that I think giving people free stuff will get them to do content, I just don't think anything short of nerfing things will get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. So if a given player was never going to do Pakecet anyway, then sure, give him a chance for a Jovian Body. What's the harm?