NM gear

[Amas]

Nah, my LS was mostly made up of old HNM retirees, and no one wanted to camp since that whole system was messed up.

When something new (e.g. DI) came along, we'd own it for a couple weeks, make a fat pile of gil on it, then do something else once it became a bot/campfest. Why sit around doing nothing for 3 hours for a chance at a Nidhogg pop when we could spent 30 mins 2x a week clearing out Einherjar, and then do an Odin every 3 weeks or so and get them that way?

Competition is what drove most good endgame players to quit... because no amount of skill or participation on their part would yield advancement. If you weren't willing to break the rules (bot), you effectively had no chance, and instead some no-skill noob with a huge ego could afk in Jeuno/Whitegate in his new Adaberk, and still be completely useless.

If you want competition, go play an FPS game. Or try to beat hard content before someone else who isn't as good.

Edit: And there's no reason instanced/non-competitive content has to be gimmies. SE made the 400 point leves too easy and the drops too crappy. The nice thing about instances is much more freedom to script the environment and encounters to make them HARD and require entirely new and different strategies, while any competitive content has very strong limitations placed on it by the open world.

[Visch]

Competition is what drove most good endgame players to quit.

They quit because they couldn't get something? Sound more like crybabies than endgame players to me. :/

If you weren't willing to break the rules (bot), you effectively had no chance, and instead some no-skill noob with a huge ego could afk in Jeuno/Whitegate in his new Adaberk, and still be completely useless.

I didn't have an issue on PS2. You needed commitment to get the good gear, that's what made the accomplishment special.

And if someone had better gear than you that you didn't like. Go merit with them and own them on the parse to prove they're a nub.

[Amas]

They quit because they couldn't get something? Sound more like crybabies than endgame players to me. :/

They quit because they got bored. Because sitting around for up to 9 hours a day doing practically nothing, for the hope of claiming one weak, easy mob to get disproportionately good drops is a stupid, lame system that encourages watching TV instead of actually playing the game. Worse still for Tiamat and ToAU mobs that were more than 24 hour spawns. Holding parties there were not "committed" just people in college who'd leave a monitor on while doing schoolwork.

I didn't have an issue on PS2. You needed commitment to get the good gear, that's what made the accomplishment special.

And if someone had better gear than you that you didn't like. Go merit with them and own them on the parse to prove they're a nub.

See, your definition of commitment is just silly.

Commitment is trying to discover strategies to beat new and different content, and continuing to try new strategies despite wiping until you find the radically new and different way to win.

Commitment in FFXI is more synonymous with pain tolerance or masochism, if your end goal was a Dalmy or an Adaberk. The kings were easy to kill, required no strategy, and the only gates to getting your drops were claiming and then drop rates.

I was RDM, NIN, and SAM. No reason to camp kings other than Dalmy (and had the commitment to do Salvage for a Morrigan's robe, since a bit of skill and persistence would pay off there, and no number of complete no-skill noobs could bot it). Crushing your average Adaberk noob in a parse wasn't hard, but didn't prove anything, since being more efficient at mindless grinding doesn't really reflect well on any "skills" FFXI required.

And I gotta say, having an entire group of friends loaded out in Salvage gear was a lot more fun than prancing around in Kings gear. Seeing as how efficiently farming Salvage took a lot more "skill" than claiming and killing Nidhogg.