Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
There is game before cap, but not much content. I think that's a very important distinction to make. Until you get to cap, the game is mostly running between areas in small groups to kill the same mob repeatedly. I remember my first step into Dynamis in FFXI - was it a whole different world, a threshold crossing, compared to the trip up? Absolutely. It felt like an achievement getting in - but not because I killed 5,000 mandragora and some ants - it was because I had earned the right to play there by learning to play my JOB.

Honestly, I think the first trip up should take you a good investment of time - but what about the rest? Why should it take the same amount of time it took you to learn to play Final Fantasy XIV just to learn how to rotate a second set of skills?

The only reason I resist the crowd who basically seem to want the time investment required to level a balanced character at all to require you be one of the ~50% of MMO players who are males between the ages of 22 and 32 who work less than four hours a day is because after that first trip, it's so unnecessary.

The only thing that becomes "irrelevant" is the gear market, whose wares are outlevelled too fast to be worth their original cost at the will of a player determined to finish that job.

To me this has nothing to do with game development; much like the arguments that gear should have required levels, it's a cultural argument. People who wore LV50 gear to a LV10 party weren't kicked from the party and told to learn to play effectively, they just inspired people to come here and whine until SE played nanny.

Do I stand by my assessment that some people spend so much time leveling that they start to think they liked it because otherwise why do it? Yes.

I also think some other people like it because they enjoy being able to invest time others can't into getting something other's can't have.

I think some enjoy it because without comparative basis, value is hard to gauge.

There's a lot of reasons, but in my humble opinion, none of them make it worth my time to do the same exact action over and over and over without learning anything new from it. That's not an MMO - that's FarmVille.
Bravo, you once again failed to answer me and continued into obscurity. But hey, just forget it.