Quote Originally Posted by predatory View Post
I figured it out. The reason for not simply unlocking all the merits, or all the weaponskills is purely a business decision. If they unlock all the weaponskills and people level and merit the appropriate weaponskills, what is to keep them logging in?

Let's look at this realistically. There is very little real endgame content compared to any time in the past. There is skirmish, (which is dying quickly)m there are WKRs, (which other than a random shout here and there, are pretty much dead), there's delve, and the high tier battlefields, (which keep you busy until you get the one piece you're after, but feel more like a grind than anything else), and that's about it.

What's to keep people playing once they've leveled and fully merited their chars out? The whole reason, (IMO), is for you to level a job lower merits in one place then go out and merit again so you can keep busy and keep logging in until next months update comes. If everyone were to suddenly be able to merit everything people would be grinding in aby for a month or so, then they'd go do there favorite endgame on a couple of different jobs, figure they'd beaten the game and you'd never see them again. I know people are going to say I'm wrong, but I'm not. I've seen alot of people come and go over the years, and the main reason I've seen people leave is they get bored, and with the little real endgame content we have, if people were fully merited what's to keep them from becoming bored in a great big hurry. Right now you have to go re-merit to play your job 100% so you keep busy on and off, what's to happen when you don't even have that to do anymore?
News flash they already do this under the current system because they got sick of repeating it over and over for the current favor of the month jobs. Grinding gets really boring no matter if you do it all in one go or you keep having to do it. Also if you haven't been paying attention HP/MP and magic skills are going up on the caps where you can either max them all or come really close. That only leaves Job merits and all but rdm have a right way to merit and anything short is going to get you excluded from content that isn't solo based.

Stop defending them for not pushing out new content and propping up this whole grinding equals content. The simple answer to keeping people from getting bored is to push out meaningful content faster. What prop the game up in the past won't cut it in today's market plan and simple. Long gone are the days of burning sky for 1% drops and trying to beat claim bots on 72 hour kings get over it or rushing that new ls member though CoP because they promised to come whm or rdm to everything. It was bad game design then and still is.

Every mob(that wasn't AV SEs little pet) in old endgame was easy once someone posted the strat and it went to another boring farm and the only reason half your ls even bother showing up was to stay on top for the drop they wanted not because they enjoyed the event or even cared for most of the other LS members. The fact the big LSes died the sec they were no longer needed show how bad it was.

Sadly SE thought it was cheaper to build another MMO from the ground up then rebuilding XI(jokes on them) and adding systems that would have made it challenging with out relying on cheap crap. Like just over powering the mobs and the players answering with only taking the one job with the highest HP and the mage that could cure for the most. If they added stuff like 14 boss fights or even some of the fights in XI where you had to pay attention to were you are standing during such and such TP move or the environment changed like the Diabolos fight.