What will happen to dated items and dated material ?

[Mihana]

I'm against doing away with the dated gear. Leave it in-game, remove the materials and recipes needed to make them. Some items as it stands don't even have current counterparts. A prime example is the sandals. We have sandals of varying colors which resemble the default footwear. There aren't any updated recipes for these items. There's several more examples too. Items like shoes (Sheepskin, Leather, Toadskin.) don't go past a certain level. What happened? We have no recipe replacements for these. Gowns barring the Ul'dahn Gown cannot be used until the 40's. Same goes for culottes. As for new players a simple fix is prevent these items from being sold in the wards/auction house/whatever they use. Items can be traded between players, put in up personal bazaars but cannot be listed for sale in other means. Removing the equipment can also hinder returning players the greatest.

What if someone quit before the new recipes came out? All their equipment is now dated and if they delete the dated equipment it will leave them with no gear. How is that fair? Some might have even been using gear not equippable by their class/level so if it's just replaced then it'll probably be unequipped and remain useless. Imagine this:

You stop playing the game before the newer recipes come out so your gear is dated. ARR arrives and you think "Hey, looks like the game has changed! I'll give it another try!" and reactivate your account. You go through, select your character and first thing you see is you're completely naked. All your equipment is gone. You have little gil and can't afford to go buy all new equipment right now and all your current equipment is either gone or been replaced with stuff you possibly cannot use or is generic. In some simple case if they delete the gear you're looking at returning characters likely being garbed in their racial clothing instead.

Now unless SE is going to carefully go through each and every player to give them updated equivalent gear to replace what they're losing it's a real downfall. Current game designs is what hinders them from adding in complete replacements for every piece of gear (I can't remember where but I know Yoshi-P commented on this regarding limitations.) but I don't see ARR having this problem being built upon a whole new engine. Overall, removing this equipment I feel would do more harm than any good really. If you look at some games (Everquest Online Adventures is an example.) there was some equipment that could be obtained for a certain period of time that later became obsolete or no longer dropped/was obtainable for whatever reason. These pieces of gear became depending on their stats rare and sought after.

Apart from looks and functionality just about every aspect of dated gear is surpassed by current, newer pieces of equipment. So FFXIV shouldn't have to suffer from something like this. I'm getting this post longer than I intended so I'm going to stop here.

tl;dr version:

1.) Keep the dated gear.
2.) Removing it affects returning players the most.
3.) Keeping it around has no effect on anyone.