Required rank on all gear

[Leeloo]

Yup...if they wanted to incentivize wearing rank appropriate gear, then all they had to do was make sure that there was a stat/attribute price to be paid in exchange for greater flexibility. Instead, many high rank gears actually give better stats at the lower ranks than the rank appropriate gear with durability being the only trade off. Seems like fixing this would have been a good first step rather than going straight to Required Rank gear.

This bundled with horrible visibility into how gear affected your stats and attributes (STR ->ACC) made it so that you couldn't determine which gear was better without a log parser.

That sums up the side of the argument I'm on. Basically, fixing/improving the optimal system with harsher penalties for being poorly geared > moving to a restricted system that accomplishes the same goal. Why go the route of further restricting freedom when it's not the only way?

[Oscillate_Wildly]

That sums up the side of the argument I'm on. Basically, fixing/improving the optimal system with harsher penalties for being poorly geared > moving to a restricted system that accomplishes the same goal. Why go the route of restricting freedom when it's not the only way?

Improvement takes a back seat to "remove, fix later."
We have to be honest with ourselves, with a new team comes a new brand of game play.
Though Yoshida should be a bit more up-front about these changes. You know, in great lengthy detail so they're not dropped on our unsuspecting heads just weeks before they're implemented. And I don't mean just this, but other things they've done in the past as well.

Like, the MP/Curaga change. Or the very vague statement about crafting which sounded like "Removal of parts for all recipes, and all future recipes. No exceptions."
We lack detail and take the outlines he gives to us as the gospel truth. So it's no wonder that as soon as they're implemented, the details we're given were no expected in the slightest.

I guess a lot of us don't see Improvement in the same light, and take that to mean "Improvement on what we already have" not "Improvement on the game and players together, creating a whole new experience."

It's short sighted but...at least now we should know better than to expect anything less than this. ): Which is a shame, because as horrible as the game kind of was at release, I much prefer what it was compared to what it's becoming.