[dev1210] Why Not Merit Weaponskills ??

[Afania]

Au contraire. My actual argument is that attempting to impose "reality" on our job system in the final throes (aka the merit point system) is a waste of time. The job system is inherently un-limiting.

I don't agree, and this is just your personal opinion, that you wanted to force your own ideal job system on to FFXI's. I think FFXI with merit point system and +/- on the stats works perfectly fine.

If you want to talk about design philosophy and removing "unnecessary" portion of the game, I can argue that dev should remove lv1~lv99 first and let everyone jump straight to endgame.

It works, and it'd work better than current FFXI. But the role playing element would be gone and make the game less interesting. Merit point system is the same.

Example: The job system and current exclusionary events indicate that we're supposed to be versatile characters so that we can take part in the content that is released. The limiting merit system discourages us from becoming more versatile and encourages us to specialize. These are obviously running at cross purposes.

All the content are still doable without having capped merit though, it didn't "discourage" the player to play certain job just because your stat is 12 lower than another player. The gap between merit point WS and the 2nd best option is a bigger issue, and that needs to be fixed. But not through removing merit point system.

This depends strongly on what you think of as "every single player". Something like 70% of the level 12 stats in 2012 were STR. Is it safe to say that "every single player" had 12 STR merits? No, but c'moooon. The data doesn't provide any information on how many people are actually at the merit cap, which makes it difficult to answer any relevant questions with it, but it looks like people overwhelmingly merit the same thing in essentially every single category that matters.

Huh, if I'm lving a mage only character or a mage mule, I probably won't merit STR, ever.