Glamour restrictions: a hinderance to creativity

[Enkidoh]

YUS! FREE THE GLAM! FREE THE GLAM!


Ironically enough, XIV's predecessor XI has free glam and it is SO nice. The only caveat is that in order to use a piece of gear as a glam item, you have to also be able to equip it normally on the job it's actually intended for (e.g. if I want to use a level 68 healer piece on my dragoon, my healer would need to be at least level 68). You also get 100 outfit slots, can create a glam anywhere (even using items that are stored elsewhere and not in inventory), apply a glam anywhere, and it doesn't take any crystals. It's such an easy system compared to what we have in XIV.

If that came to XIV, I know I personally would be spending SO much more time running all those random dungeons and raids in order to build up my options. I imagine a lot of others would be doing the same.

Except in practice FFXI's glamour system (style lock) has a lot of it's own deficincies and issues:

For most of FFXI's run the game never had any glamour at all, and gear restrictions were tighter than here in FFXIV.
There still isn't and has never been any kind of gear dyeing system in FFXI like we have here in FFXIV.
Glamour in FFXI was only introduced a fair bit of time after it was introduced in FFXIV (and that was after the original FFXI development team left)
When style lock was first introduced in FFXI it was restricted to your Job (and as Job switching in FFXI is restricted to inside your Moghouse or using a Nomad Moogle in certain towns it's not something you could easily swap around).
Glamour restrictions were only lessened after a certain amount of time in a patch, because FFXI is in it's Indian Summer and has a skeleton staff development team running things, and really no longer take things like keeping the game balanced seriously anymore.
A fair number of enemies (particularly high level ones) will deactivate style lock completely (as in, completely delete your current glamour) with certain attacks that strip your gear (namely yagudo enemies in Campaign battles, and those giant red slugs found out in Pashow Marshlands in the past), which is extremely frustrating. Using the traditional gear swap trick with your weapon also deactivates glamour, not to mention changing Jobs, forcing you to reset your glamour manually again.

I mean, I'm all for improving the glamour system here in FFXIV, but it gets tiresome when I see players trying to make it out FFXI has the better system when it's not necessarily better at all and has it's own fair share of problems. The other grass is greener though I guess.