Quote Originally Posted by Holland View Post
Note: Content in Final Fantasy XI lasted so long not because it was difficult or challenging, but because of the absurd drop rates, the time wasting game mechanics, etc.
Those time wasting mechanics did make the aquisition of items rather hard. If you couldn't/wouldn't invest the time to get a item you didn't get it. If you couldn't get it yourself you bought it, because the game could support itself like that.

I'm not sure what people think "Hard" is, "Hard" is not just something that requires a specific skillset/rank to acomplish. If you reason that a time investment is not adding difficulty addine a learning curve itself is not difficult either. Learning is nothing more than investing your time and being able to apply the knowledge gained in said timeframe.

You have to spend time to learn your class, skills, party, zones, monsters. It's not so absurd to think you might need to also spend time actually aquiring the item. Boiling it down to nothing but "Skill" is pointless as to make anything worthwhile a actual reward the content would have to be extremly hard to give any real "Hell yeah!" effect when you obtained the item.

Luck is a factor in designing good gameplay elements as well, it can't always boil down to Kill ____ Get ____ 100% of the time. If you think that it is...I just don't know what to say.