Ifirit, how it could have been done better.

[Ava]

Are you trying to say they should appeal to the audience of people that want to log in for one night a week beat the newest instance / boss and then log on next week?

I'm really not saying anything.. for myself, the fight is fun - albeit a little too easy at this point but still fun. I personally would rather do 100 Ifrit fights than 1 and be locked out.

Edit: Oh and even in WoW's lockout system you might not get your drop. You could get the same drops for weeks on end. So I would def rather try my luck at 500 Ifrit attempts in a month than 4 chances at my drop in WoW.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Those people's monthly fee is worth just as much as yours, and there are more of them than you. Hence why WoW, Rift, and soon to be SWTOR are among the only widely successful MMORPGs. They appeal to that very crowd - the majority. Now, of course, they can't ignore the group that wants to do Ifrit 100 times in one week, so they should still provide hardcore content, but it should come AFTER the casual content because the casuals will bring in the $$$.

Edit: An example of making Ifrit both casual and hardcore without removing the "uniqueness" from the game (crafters wont be happy but this is just an off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion) would be to use the token idea I mentioned above and instead of buying weapons, perhaps you can use the tokens to "unlock" the weapons and allow you to apply materia to them. They could maybe incorporate crafters in with it by using an enchantment type system but I don't think the UI could support that right now. Either way, they don't need to segregate the casuals and hardcores, just make the content multi-tiered so casuals can do it and get stuff, but hardcores can do it and get even more/better stuff.