Quote Originally Posted by Kaurie View Post
I don't see why if a piece of content is horrible why I would want to do it for 3 hours, or why someone having done it for 3 hours is a warrant for why it's good to have it 90 minutes (or even 10 minutes). Instead, they should just focus on fun content.
Because it's all the players had for years. It was either that, or compete with the entire server to get sky gods, or land kings. The sky gods you would have to kill a certain notorious monster (for most) to get a key item. You would need 2 different items per lesser god. After killing 4 of those lesser gods, you could spawn Kirin, for your chance at his drops. Everything was extremely grindy and random. And the land kings took days for their respawn timers to be up, then could take hours to spawn while various linkshells camped them. Only one group could "claim" a mob in FFXI, so it became very salty when other groups "lost."

All of this to get the "sideway" stats that you mentioned. Or in FFXI's world, for every positive stat, they had to give you a negative. It led to gear swapping (blinking out) in parties, which became tedious. A gear set to gain TP. A gear set to regain MP. A gear set to deal your super mega weaponskill. Situational gear, only used to make your abilities better (usually by minimal +X standards).