Honestly, I think the player's polls were looking for justification to the make the changes they wanted to make. We asked for content, we get battle changes. We ask for an auction house, we get NMs.

I'm a little disappointed if this is true, since contested claims were one of the more entertaining aspects of FFXI to me, but on the other hand I can understand why they would want to move away from the greed and frustration that this sort of system incurs.

What would be cool, and what I hope is the direction they are going with this, is if there are world NMs that the players must join together en masse to take down, like the Morbol seen in the introduction video.