Overall I wouldn't mind it working like this.

As it is now, I just try to cling to what little scraps we have in this area. I get new gear when it's available. I meld materia asap. I buy the latest food and use it everywhere, including dungeons (unlike 99% of players). I got things such as the stat increases in Bozja knowing it is ultimately pointless because it won't be used anywhere else (although it would become obsolete after a new expansion or earlier anyway). But I feel that gear just progresses really fast in some cases that it doesn't give you much time to appreciate what work you put into your previous gear.

I set goals for myself such as mounts, to give me a reason to do a variety of content and make up for the lack of sensible achievements (such as the ones involving 10,000, 100,000 or a million of certain activities).

But all of this is self-created content and goals unlike your suggestions (although some others do these things too to create goals for themselves as well).

Quote Originally Posted by Koros View Post
At some point I think developers need to ignore that there will be a meta.
I agree because some people won't choose the meta anyway. It's like how when we had stance dancing some people would choose to play defensively 100% of the time and do less damage and they must have been able to read this stance reduces their damage. Or some people do actually stack Tenacity still.

We currently have different BiS sets for most jobs that people can choose based on their preferences for comfort, speed, and need to play multiple jobs. People will math out the degree of personalization, but if it's well-balanced then there will still be a choice players can make that will be competitive with the absolute best pick.
I'm glad that it's gone this way where personalization is promoted a lot now, such as comfortable skill speeds. I feel that a lot of people still seek out what is "best" no matter what, to the point of searching for a post they can trust that tells them what is BiS, ignoring all the "depends" stuff. But for as many players that do that, there are going to be plenty that just do whatever they want.

In Bozja there are absolute best picks but most casual players would bring something like Regen or Shell even if it's mathematically actually extremely terrible because they like healing themselves or having the feeling of applying buffs on their party members
This is another example like how people used to use tank stance that reduced outgoing damage. Also like how healers could spam their attack and only use off-globals, but you will see some of them casting cure and adlo constantly on WHM and SCH, and if you talk to them about it some of them are aware of what they are doing and just like playing that way.