Never Make Your Players Have to "Find the Fun"

[Alahra]

This game simply does not let players "jump into content" whenever they want. It's a major, major design flaw.

But this is objectively untrue. The whole existence of the Duty Finder is to allow players to "jump into content" whenever they want. Yes, some content rewards are gated by time and in the world, some things have respawn timers, but the largest majority of the game's content is meant to be consumed whenever you want.

No, you can't farm Esoterics until your eyes bleed, but the alternative is a lot more RNG (or massively increased costs for items that are currency-based). In order to maintain challenge for raid-difficulty content), the developers need to have some ability to anticipate the power level of the player characters. If we could gear up as rapidly as we want to, the developers would need to balance that content essentially always assuming maximum-level gear, which would create a lot of problems progression-wise for players that can't play twelve hours a day, making the game far more difficult to balance.

Other content that has spawn timers, like Hunts and FATEs, are in party designed that way to help break monotony so that grinding aspects don't become too repetitive.

And quite frankly, I like that the game has things that don't always involve jumping right into content because the game's GCD-based combat system makes it rather difficult to socialize with my friends when I'm actually engaged in combat. The periods of downtime are welcome because they help keep the "massively multiplayer" part of the game alive.

I do think the developers made mistakes in adding another aspect to the game that is time gated (the whole Crafting/Gatherer Red Scrip system), but in general, if I wanted to have total control over my content consumption, I'd play a console RPG, personally.

I'd be happy with just having tomes tied to class, rather than character, so we could choose to gear up multiple classes per lockout

I would like to see them do this eventually, but it would need to be done per role rather than per class, unless they move to making all gear job-specific (which, at least at this point, doesn't seem likely).