This game is far to difficult.

[blowfin]

But this is... common for MMO "end" raids. If it were really so bad, you would see more MMOs phasing out such lockouts on even the highest tier content.

Just because it's "common" doesn't make it a good idea, nor does it mean different companies will execute it well. Are you referring to MMO's that have gone F2P or just to Wow? It's important to keep in mind that it's great for it's main purpose, which is gating us until the next content comes out, but it comes at a high price: segregating people into statics and effectively leaving behind people in your FC/LS who aren't so lucky. I lost count of the amount of people leaving the FC in the early days because they got left out of Coil1 groups, there is no way that's "building community".

Lockouts are necessary of course, I've just seen it done about a thousand times better in other titles (hint: XI). If what we have here is very similar to other "successful" MMO's, then I think it's high time those ideas got re-thought. Not in the least because the vast majority of recent MMO releases have gone F2P within a year.

His point and mine was that these prophetic warnings of community destruction in raiding mmos happen all the time and have yet to materialize, making these complaints look like nothing but hot air.

No, the community is fractured to begin with. In the case of this game it's been that way since 2.0.

Yoshida: You mean in the sense that you can help other people. In that case, our concern is that by being able to excessively help other people by going around with groups that can't clear the content on their own yet, the hierarchy of the more and more powerful items would be broken too quickly. We worry about this and this and the development team does understand the current circumstances. It's really a difficult question to answer, but that's why we've chosen our current policy and we'll continue to mitigate it in stages.

This basically boils down to: Because..... gating.