I do not have a "Main" I want to gear all jobs, change weekly gatings?

[Skivvy]

You say people are getting tired of artificial extension of old content due to gating. When you fail to realize something: content becomes old the week of the patch day, if not the same day as the patch.

Content that takes months to make is old content faster then the content that can be made. You literally cannot make content fast enough for an MMO to try to go with a gateless system. Every single MMO developer in the world will tell you that.

Be it the gate is measured and can be mathed out like what we have here... or like in many other MMOs where it is completely random drops with low drop chances that could take years of farming, or only minutes of farming depending on your luck.

Which every time I see the RNG gating, it always leads to mass burn out and an overt focus on retention mechanics to force a need to keep logging in every day to compete to try to keep people playing through the burn out. As well they have to be even more aggressive in getting new players because they burn the ones they have out faster then they can often times be retained.

Which happens to be one of the reasons why WoW is struggling to retain subs and is losing them to other MMOs like FFXIV. It got so bad that they stopped reporting sub numbers after losing 50% of their population in less then 6 months after the Warlords of Draenor launch.

Every MMO does the artificial extension of old content. Its required to make it from one patch to the next if you want to retain player counts. Cause no company can compress 3 months worth of work into 1 week to keep up with a weekly major content patch schedule to try to outpace player consumption of content. Its an age old unsolvable problem of MMOs.

This probably would need to be in a separate discussion thread on its own, but I find part of the reason why XIV and its content becomes stale so quickly is the level of vertical gear progression that they chose to go with.

Each major patch brings us a new tomestone, where everything else is instantly outdated and obsolete. We normally get 2-3 new "expert" dungeons, a new 8-man raid, and down the line a 24 man raid. The pattern is stale and predictable. Sure, we visit old dungeons now and then, but I think most of us probably only ever see them when doing our Roulettes as there is very little reason to ever go back -outside of helping new players or glamour.

Touchy subject around these parts, but XI had a massive amount of gearing options and end-game variety by this point in it's life. At 4 years in, they had just released their 4th major expansion Wings of the Goddess. I'm sure I'll probably forget something, but that means gearing could be done by Dynamis, Assaults, Einherjar, Limbus, Salvage, Sea, Sky, Nyzul, ENMs, BCNMs, ZNMs, etc. The fun part was that everything was still completely relevant, even the events that came out that first year. Reason being - horizontal gearing. Gear had very specific stat and various skill boosts - so you would want to collect specific pieces to buff certain actions and abilities.

Now, obviously XIV is a completely different game, and they've gone down a very different path. Just pointing out that not every MMO's content is outdated the week it comes out It's amusing to me how SE has gone from creating one of the more challenging MMOs, to creating one of the more simplistic ones. Just looking for some middle ground here.