Quote Originally Posted by Draylo View Post
Somebody has to play support jobs or the group won't succeed, 18man or 6man. If you don't have the time to sink into an MMO, you can't expect to be the best. You should be content with eminent gear and reforged AF, the low tier gear was created for players like you. The top end gear should be to the people who are most dedicated and are able to field the things necessary to win it.
Unfortunately MMO's don't work that way. The "high end" players don't contribute enough financially to justify keeping the servers going, it's the casual players that are actually footing the bill for the game's development. Creating content that they are, by design, locked out of is not only ethnically wrong but will eventually result in a loss of total subscriptions and money. There should never be any content / reward that is out of reach of casual players. The separator between "hard core" and "casual" should not be the gear that is obtainable but rather the speed at which it's obtained. Hard core folk will simply get the gear faster then the casual players, but the casual players should still have the chance at obtaining that gear, provided they put in the time. This is one are that SE is really struggling with, they can't seem to find a balance with accessibility and are really afraid of allowing gear from hard event A to become accessibly through easy event B at a much slower rate. Abyssea was the closest they got to getting it right, casual players could still get their stuff eventually, hard core folks with plenty of time and access to lots of resources would have it done much faster.

If every "hard core" player in FFXI quit tomorrow, the game could easily continue on and the developers would end up adjusting it down. If every "casual" player quit tomorrow, the game would shut down within a month. That is how little hard core players actually matter to non-competitive MMO's.