FFXI fixed!

[Arcon]

You need to find another way to be rewarded is all I can say. Having good gear makes doing events easier. Its a fact that doing Neo-nyzul in pink gear is never gonna reward you with that floor 100 win. That means that when they come out with the next event that's even harder and people start going "sorry buddy, we only let people in our shell who have 15/15 neo-nyzul gear, then said pink player has reached the end of the road. his problems grow exponentially as they add more and more events that require higher and higher levels of weapons and gear. Eventually he is excluded from everything worth doing.

That's actually a quantitative issue instead of a qualitative one. You can't flat out say that's always the case, but it actually depends on what the gear is like. While Neo-Nyzul gear is indeed godly, it's far from necessary. That's one of the advantages Abyssea brought with it that I mentioned in another thread just last night: it set an even ground for Lv99 content. You can consider someone with AF3+2 gear to be well-geared. Which is no indication of skill by itself, but which means they aren't limited by bad gear, as a pink player would be. A skilled player can only be as good as his gear allows, and Abyssea gear goes a long way in that regard.

I don't see exclusion by gear being much of a problem, at least not to the degree it used to be. A RDM with the AF2 head had a major advantage because 1MP/tick Refresh meant a lot back in the day. These days standard gear adds so much in terms of stats that even Neo-Nyzul adds no qualitative advantages anymore. All the necessary gear to make a great player is readily available in form of AF3+2, AF2+2 and some random pieces you can get here and there. You can cap PDT and MDT without a Laeradr Breastplate. You can cap Haste without Phorcys Dirs. You can cap Cure Potency without Nares Trews. The list goes on.

Hence I don't see why adding rewards that are actually difficult to come by (in terms of skill, not luck or time) would upset balance in the game's community. Cases such as the one you mentioned seem unlikely to me. They wouldn't even have to battle-related, if you ask me, but even just convenience items, such as movement gear, or inventory savers for stats that are already easy to cap like PDT/MDT gear or Cure Potency. Trophy items could work too, but I don't think many people would be motivated just for those.

I know that people who ask for these things usually seem like elitist who wanna be better than others. But as I said, I don't care for that. I've beaten countless single-player games on extreme, not because that gave me any advantage over someone else, but because I wanted to test my skills. I will admit though, that that mentality is more appropriate for offline-games. MMORPGs are more of a project, something to build and grow your character in and play for the sake of playing, rather than for the sake of achievement. But I can't help feeling like something would be missing if I just played it without trying to improve my skills all the time, which, as I said, would be pointless if there was nothing to do it for. And I think I'm not the only one who feels that way.