I'm glad someone brought this up. This is one of the reasons I've had trouble getting into this game. Current open world NMs are just too easy. There's no surprise, adrenaline rush, contest-- no feeling of reward when you down them because you know they're going to pop back up in a few minutes. I'm okay with these kind of NMs staying in the game, but I think at least 25% of NMs should use something like ffxi's system. I enjoyed hunting things like charybdis and the sahagin NMs, or Stray Mary and Leaping Lizzy. There's a lot I can't remember about ffxi after a few years but I really enjoyed the NM system.

I'm not talking about the big game 24 hour spawns necessarily, although those were fun, too. Maybe those could be made to be a completely random spawn. I also liked having the occasional dragon around (like the big guy down in KRT or the one in the icelands. I can't remember place names anymore). Having these NMs added a certain quality to the world of ffxi-- more possibilities. Finding an NM actually gave you a jolt, because you didn't expect them to be sitting there 24/7. Finding a big ass dragon gave you one more reason to level up.

Hard to explain, but FFXI had a really rich NM world even outside of the spawns that were commonly botted.