Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
I believe I've said this here before, but...

I tend to think that while it's perfectly fine to lock rewards behind specific content -- e.g., "you must clear <X> to obtain <Y>" and so on -- I dislike making things permanently time-limited.

Does FOMO encourage short-term participation? Most likely, yeah. But is it beneficial in the long run? I don't think so.

But back when the Garo event was gone, I had friends who joined the game and were heartbroken that there were things (notably the Makai Fists) which they could never obtain because the rewards were no longer in game. The existence of those items did not encourage them to play PvP, it just made them sad they had no way to get them.

Now, the Garo event was a special case; it was a licensed crossover with a non-SQEX property, and the rights-holder put a time limit on it, and SQEX did manage to eventually negotiate its return. But it works as an example for this thread nonetheless.

I should clarify that I don't think items need to be available via the same method forever, nor that they can't be temporarily exclusive. You want to give rewards for the top 100 in PvP? Cool! Those can be exclusive for, say, two years. And after two years, it's fair game to release them for wolf marks or trophy crystals or whatever.

Folks who do the time-limited achievement have a thing to show off for a while, and folks who show up to the game late and never even had a chance at the thing know that it'll turn up available a different way eventually, which lessens the sting of missing out.

(Because let's be honest, it can be very depressing to join a game late and be like "...oh, well, I guess I cannot ever obtain <thing X> because it was available for three months, back a year and a half before I started playing.")

Look at how event-exclusive stuff is handled in this game. Let's say you miss this year's Heavensturn event, and so don't get the nice cosmetic armor they released... we know that they pretty much without fail release the previous event's stuff on the Mog Station when the event rolls around the next year. Meaning, sure, you are out of luck on the armor this year if you can't play right now, but next year the armor'll be in the Mog Station cash shop and you can pick it up that way.

Now, whether or not the cash shop is the correct way to handle that is another whole (potentially very loud/lengthy) debate. But you can get the event stuff free in-game when it's current, and you know you aren't completely out of luck forever if you miss that window; that's better than a lot of alternatives, and it's what's relevant for purposes of this thread.

Nobody would go through the struggle and competiveness of Ranked PvP, if they can just wait and get it for free by grinding loses in frontline. You kill the mode with it.