[DEV] Time sinks and satisfaction, a plea from one of your hardcore fans

[Anty]

No. That's called "Alpha and Omega itemization". That was a sign of very bad game design that incurred a timesink through gearing and was made worse by community expectations. Did you forget that you were considered a gimp THF and a gimp NIN for not having those items?

The means through which to obtain the items were also horrible, as both were non-guaranteed drops from mobs that were heavily camped by everyone, their mother and their army of /anon RNGs. That was not fun. It was not worthwhile. It was a waste of time that reduced the value of almost everything else for those slots that came your way.

in most mmos you are considered "gimp" if you don't wear "purple" gear of some sort or don't meet special requirements. That is nothing new and happens in almost every game. Or something like " we doin hardmode XXX dungeon, ABCDXXXXX required, don't bother applying if you dont have YYYY gear...
Its commong game design, FFXI did a good thing adding those valuable items at many stages where other mmos only focus on endgame leading to an empty world and people not caring about anything but rushing to cap then raiding their asses off.

You had something to do in ffxi in every lvl, and you had many choices. Most mmos don't offer these choices.

[Duelle]

in most mmos you are considered "gimp" if you don't wear "purple" gear of some sort or don't meet special requirements. That is nothing new and happens in almost every game. Or something like " we doin hardmode XXX dungeon, ABCDXXXXX required, don't bother applying if you dont have YYYY gear...

Which is fine in the context of endgame raiding. I've been part of that scene, as I was a full-time raider in WoW at one point.

FFXI used it as a cockblock in the leveling process. Not to mention it was either that or nothing, because no piece of gear ever came close to Leaping Boots or Emperor Hairpin. I wouldn't have been so against it if there had been a couple of pieces per slot that came somewhere close to fill in instead of being "super awesome stats" vs "useless piece with elemental resistances". I'll even avoid going into how the systems in XI allowed RMT to thrive, and instead of saying "maybe we designed a bad system and we should fix it" they decided to hire a group of people whose sole task is to monitor transactions in-game.

You had something to do in ffxi in every lvl, and you had many choices. Most mmos don't offer these choices.

Which doesn't mean much when the majority of the choices are the wrong ones. Farming sessions were tedious and boring. Sitting around camping NMs was boring.

It'd be one thing if you were talking about building stuff like relics, mythics or the legendaries from WoW (all of which require the LS/guild putting their efforts together to make it reality). You're asking for Leaping Lizzie and Valkurm Emperor, instead.