Quote Originally Posted by Zarzak View Post
Eh depends how you mean. In raid content surely. Though my point would be why does it matter if the top raiders are in ilvl 150 gear and you are still in ilvl 90 gear if you are progressing and the gear is sufficient to do anything besides the raids past the ones immediately ahead of you.

That being said it was common practice among the top guilds (usually the #1 on each server) to host open raids. We would get our content on farm quickly and be down to like 2 raid nights a week. So we would take a random day (my guild did saturday) and host an open raid for the server. We would usually play alts (or play mains to help but "roll" for our alts) and take anyone who wanted to come through the easier raids of the current expansion.
Commends to your guild for doing that, but my experience in other games hasn't been like that. Most of the time there is a high bar to entry into high end content and that leads to a sort of "click" of people that run that content. It was really bad in FFXI. Alot of content was gated by large groups of not only capped characters, but geared to be able to do it as well. In XI you didn't just waltz into dynamis or limbus. You had to spend alot of time acquiring items and abilities to even be considered for something like that.

I think that is the fear of what they don't want.

For example:

I played FFXI for a year and really took my time ( I was working and in college at the time) leveling my paladin up. I loved tanking in FFXI and was super excited the day I hit level 75. So, I go around and try to get a LS that would take me on to get into sky and dynamis. Those slots were already filled by tanks that were already geared to the teeth. Noone wanted the new PLD and getting merits was a freakin' nightmare. So, I dropped PLD and leveled SAM to 75 instead. Same thing, go get a Hagun and Sniper rings and we'll talk kid. So I farm up the several million gil I need to buy these things and FINALLY i get to enter endgame content. It was 2 YEARS in the making.

Thats what SE did to the casual playerbase in XI. They are vehemently avoiding doing that again with this game.