Alliance based content

[Mefuki]

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.

...you end up having to be really picky who you bring, only top end people who already have all the gear that drops. The MNK's your bringing to Tojil better already have the knuckles that drop from Tojil, and any other DD's your bring also need the best respective weapons.

Indeed, both major problems. SE seemed to get the former correct with revamped AF/Relic. Collecting Chapters in these different ways was a really great idea. I'm totally OK with the idea of taking much longer then people with connections. So long as I can actually make progress and I'm not just told, "Oh, you don't know X person or Y people? Well, you can't do it". Because the issue here isn't that I don't want to put in effort (I slowly grinded gil for 2 months everyday to get enough to buy my HMP last year), it's that I want to actually play the game: Without being told to wait 2+ hours before I can start making progress or that I'm just not allowed to have X gear because I don't really know certain people in game.

Basically, this:

The separator between "hard core" and "casual" should not be the gear that is obtainable but rather the speed at which it's obtained.