Quote Originally Posted by Pandastirfry View Post
The point I'm trying to make here, is that FFXI didn't have complex game mechanics. What it had was bog-standard gameplay for a late '90's early '00's MMO, it was really no different from Ultima or Everquest, it was just set in Final Fantasy Millieu and had time sinks out the wazoo. most of the "FFXI was hardcore, FFXI was better...blah blah blah" is fueled largely by nostalgia, not anything actually concrete.

Time invested can be a component of a "hardcore" game, but in the case of XI, you put in a lot of work for very little reward. Drop rates were ridiculous (0 of 200 for the Monster Signa...wooo HARDCORE!!) and you spent so much time waiting, no not playing, literally sitting on your butt in Jeuno waiting for something...anything to happen.

and really I'm not complaining about something taking a lot of work or time to get done (ask me how many times I've killed Arthas in WoW...if you guessed 0 you'd be right) what I'm taking exception to is this rose colored glasses look to the sins of XI, there was no big reward at the end of those tunnels...it usually was an oncoming train of further grind
1/1 on Monster Signa. Then I killed him again years later a couple times when he was no longer camped and got it again on the 4th or 5th kill. The thing about algorithms is that they are unchanging. You can flip a coin and a have a 50% chance of it coming up heads or tails, but when it lands on tails you don't have a better chance of it being heads on the next flip, the percentage remains the same. I'm sorry for your luck.