Yoshi-P on Character Growth

[Zumi]

It opens up the ability to gear up multiple jobs. Hardcore/world-firsters can go for that slight upgrade. More casual players can go for their choice of content, even if it's slightly inferior, because it's good enough.

One example we already have is our 24-man raids. They're clearly inferior yet people do them anyway. Under a more horizonal system, it wouldn't be inferior; it would be on par.

I wouldn't want to see FFXI style gearing in FFXIV. This is what kind of turned FFXI into a chat room and lead a lot of people to not do the new content. Horizontal progression is an oxymoron it doesn't really exist what FFXI had was vertical progression on a very small scale. What you already said the upgrades were minor. For example FFXI came out with a medium difficulty event Salvage. It had drop rates on nms in the zone in the range of around 1%. I actually knew people who killed this turtle NM 300+ times for the monk body. But the itemization was that a several of the pieces were worse had worse stats then gear from 6 years ago that dropped from Sky or hnms, however about half of those pieces of gear that were very slightly better maybe had 1-3 more attack or accuracy or 1% more haste something really small. The hard core playerbase in FFXI were like yea I am going to run Salvage daily even though it has 1% drop rates for those really small upgrades which may effect character damage by around 1% but its best in slot. However the more casual players were like I am not doing this it doesn't offer a big enough upgrade I am good with my sky gear from 6 years ago.

So for these players who didn't want to run the new content for the small upgrades they quit never bought the next expansion which was Wings of the Goddess. Some of them just logged in the game used it as a chat room. Many people will not do content with really small upgrades.

[MomomiMomi]

...

Here too you're talking about something entirely different. The drop rate has nothing to do with the gearing system. The rate of gear acquisition doesn't have to change from what we have now on FF14.

Changing to a "more options" system doesn't mean "We're going to make this exactly like FFXI so you're going to have a 1% drop rate to get this piece of gear."

[Zumi]

Here too you're talking about something entirely different. The drop rate has nothing to do with the gearing system. The rate of gear acquisition doesn't have to change from what we have now on FF14.

Changing to a "more options" system doesn't mean "We're going to make this exactly like FFXI so you're going to have a 1% drop rate to get this piece of gear."

A lot of people didn't do the content like Salvage because it had maybe 1 or 2 more attack on the gear form what they already had. Wasn't that it was 1% drop rates alone. It was the super small upgrades that people didn't feel like was worth their time.

The FFXIV equivalent example if they used the FFXI system "SE adds the next alexander raid. For the most part half the gear is worse then the previous alexander raid, but half the gear has maybe 5 more crit, or 5 determination on it but overall has similar stats to what they already released. You have to learn new fights spend a lot of time to get gear that you won't see a huge increase on damage at all."

[MomomiMomi]

A lot of people didn't do the content like Salvage because it had maybe 1 or 2 more attack on the gear form what they already had. Wasn't that it was 1% drop rates alone. It was the super small upgrades that people didn't feel like was worth their time.

It wasn't worth their time because of the 1% drop rate though. If it's easy to acquire, time isn't much of an issue.