I just don't get it.

[OMGAFLYINGPENGUIN]

It's probably because many people here have likely come from games where the hamster wheel is much, MUCH worse in comparison.

The game I came from, Dragon Nest, was notorious for making your gear worthless within MONTHS if you didn't have the absolute best raid gear. And by worthless I mean absolutely worthless. It had several tiers of gear at level cap, of which the highest tier was reserved for raiders. Thing is that gear was completely untradeable, and while the same may be said of FFXIV, gearing in that game also had a super RNG layer known as 'enhancement' that is far, FAR worse than materia overmelding. For one, enhancement basically made up like 50% of an item's stats, the game doesn't even TELL you the success rate, and it basically got to the point where even for fresh endgame gear, you were better off continuing using your old gear until you could scrounge up the funds to enhance. If you ever could.

Basically, imagine if overmelding additionally cost you 1 million gil per attempt, and the materia made up like 75% of the item's stats. That's basically enhancing endgame gear in DN in a nutshell. It was even worse for the highest tier raid gear, where the costs of enhancement are basically 10x that of the other tiers. Sure, the piece of gear would last you like a year if not longer, but due to the super RNG heavy nature, you could break your bank and get nothing out of it in return. Not only that, but the stat bloat became so insane that for level capped characters, jumping from the gearing tier below raid gear and using the top tier raid gear itself could pretty much boost your stats by as much as 50%. So imagine what kind of stats were needed for even casual content.

The hilarious part is that everyone with the top raid gear basically just sits around in towns all day complaining that the game is dead because there's nothing worth doing until the next raiding tier is out.

Ar you're from the DN sea forums aren't you. Well I've spent like 30K SGD on dragon nest, though I've made the money back in the competitions http://dn.cherrycredits.com/greendragonresult, I have decided that enough is enough. With the way Cherrycredit manages DN with its unethical methods, i choose not to be a part of it. Shanda(publisher of ff14 china too) isn't exactly planning to do much with DN except milking the living hell out of its current player base in DN. I very much enjoy ff very much because this game has by far the best communication I have seen between developer teams and players, a far cry from what I've seen in other games, while I can see the good in vertical progression I can also see the bad.

Dragon nest offers top tier gears as long as you can pay for it, top tier gears cost between 6-7k USD every 6-8months. FF is somewhat gated by time and DN is gated by money, without the highest end gears you can barely attempt raids within the current level cap. 90% of the content is cash updated, that you most likely have to spend 500USD- 1kUSD, sometimes 2kUSD for one piece of item. So I'd rather stick with subscription games.

I can see more good in this game because of the horrible games I have come from.I am very neutral about this though I am leaning more towards lesser vertical progression and something more diversified. Many MMOS now lack what RO had back, quoted from Thedoddler from RO " The modern MMO is a treadmill of goto’s and do-this’, and for it’s grinding leveling gameplay, my experience with Ragnarok and how I play it, even how I build my character is always different from the next guy, which is something the modern MMO doesn’t give you." While vertical progression is a safer route I do hope down the road there will be more diversity because to summarized it right now its basically " Cap tomes -> Buy equipment -> until new tomes are introduce, repeat".