Why can't it always be like this?

[Ayrie]

Tome caps are meant to extend the life of content by placing real barriers in the way of progress. This means that to beat 8-man Savage X, players must have ilvl Y, and that will take them Z weeks to accomplish. Now couple that on top of getting 1 drop a week, possibly, it will take D weeks to truly get the "best gear" available in that content.

The reason they care at the speed of which you hit these caps is because: if you cap everything you need to do for the next 6 months in 3 weeks... they run the risk of losing 5 months of your subscription.

If they keep you around for 3-4 months, there is a very high chance that you'll stick around the full 6 because of "working towards" being ready for the next big dungeon.

That the answer you were looking for?

[Skivvy]

Tome caps are meant to extend the life of content by placing real barriers in the way of progress. This means that to beat 8-man Savage X, players must have ilvl Y, and that will take them Z weeks to accomplish. Now couple that on top of getting 1 drop a week, possibly, it will take D weeks to truly get the "best gear" available in that content.

The reason they care at the speed of which you hit these caps is because: if you cap everything you need to do for the next 6 months in 3 weeks... they run the risk of losing 5 months of your subscription.

If they keep you around for 3-4 months, there is a very high chance that you'll stick around the full 6 because of "working towards" being ready for the next big dungeon.

That the answer you were looking for?

Everyone seems to think that this game is full of mainly raiders. I'm struggling to find it right this moment, but awhile back SE had released numbers showing how many people actually have cleared content. The top raids had an embarrassingly small number of people who had actually cleared it. So why are we using them to defend having these restrictions?

Removing the tomes cap will help "normal" players far more than anything else. It opens up the chance to try out a new job, and have it properly geared so you can get a good feel of it vs. finally getting around to gearing it just before a new Tome is released and you get to start all over.

[Kallera]

Snip.

I thought the problem people have was that players were not competent at their playstyle? If the caps were removed were to cause a lot more people to clear the raids, wouldn't that be a noticable improvement of the playerbase's skill? I know the raids are not the reason I'm staying, pretty much threw the towel at a11s and stayed out of Midas.

The socializing and more casual content gets me staying far more than the raid tier. If it wasn't for potd 3.5 would been torture.

[KisaiTenshi]

Tome caps are meant to extend the life of content by placing real barriers in the way of progress. This means that to beat 8-man Savage X, players must have ilvl Y, and that will take them Z weeks to accomplish. Now couple that on top of getting 1 drop a week, possibly, it will take D weeks to truly get the "best gear" available in that content.

The reason they care at the speed of which you hit these caps is because: if you cap everything you need to do for the next 6 months in 3 weeks... they run the risk of losing 5 months of your subscription.

If they keep you around for 3-4 months, there is a very high chance that you'll stick around the full 6 because of "working towards" being ready for the next big dungeon.

That the answer you were looking for?

This is almost hitting the nail on the head.

The reason there is a cap is mainly to avoid two kinds of behavior:
- Automated behavior, eg powerleveling bots or players being paid to level.
- To extend the life of the content, otherwise people would just get all the gear they want and not bother trying the raid content which has slightly better gear as rewards.

This is why the relic/zodiac/anima weapon quests are such time sinks. It's actually quite a pity that they create these huge time sinks and then you throw that weapon away on the next expansion. SE should quit doing that.

Either:
a) Create an entire set of anima/spirit gear that has to all be at the same level to work, with each gear needing to acquire "light" from their specific dungeons, and thus you have to upgrade the entire set at once, not piecemeal. So you would only ever bother with this on your main job.
or
b) Create an entirely HQ crafting-related gear (no tome purchases, beast tribe, hunt seals, or grand company seal purchases) set of quests that require level 30 (ilevel 50), 50(ilevel 100), 60(ilevel 200) or 70(ilevel 300) crafting levels to progress. So once you farm whatever item from a dungeon, you can craft that stage of the gear. Yes there is a risk of destroying it if your crafting isn't up to spec, by which you start over. Basically you talk to the NPC who gives you an untradeable item you take into the dungeon, complete the dungeon, return it to the NPC and they give you the next ingredient to craft that is untradeable to upgrade the gear.

The obvious problem here is, well the current tomes gear is ilevel 310, yes but the HQ version of crafted gear can take melds and dyes. So it should be possible to re-make gear for each ilevel crafting starting with the ilevel 100, 200, or 300 gear and transfer socketed materia and dyes to the new gear.