Droprate unbalanced

[Penthea]

This game has multiple avenues for gear. There are loot drops, weekly token drops, weekly savage book tokens, tome gear and crafted gear. If we had only rng to rely on for gear OP may have a point, but this isn't the case.

If OP's buddies want to quit over loot rng then they should stay away from mmorpgs in general. Those games are riddled with rng and FFXIV has less of it than most without having any pay to win perks.

[Burmecia]

Ok. I like gear/stuff too, don't we all?

Begun enjoying raiding 100% more when I just quit caring if I get loot or not, if that makes sense. In static environment, I 1000% agree dps should just have priority on nice stuff. Next week goes that much more smoother. It's team effort. Hence, on current tier, on 6th week, I get my first coffer which is not even part of bis im aiming for. But I take my ilvl increases as I come across them.

I don't care about mounts and bells and whistles, so I cannot sympathise with "lost 100 mount rolls and now im frustrated >" angst. I help my friends and FC to farm this stuff though, because 1 less person to roll against is something they find helpful.

Toxicity incoming: About only thing I find annoying is when idiot or baddie gets the mount or whatever. Like, you're welcome for carry.

[PondHollow]

The average acquisition rate for pretty much anything in the game can be replicated or closely approximated with token-based systems. As is, for example, an E5S clear can drop 20 tokens worth of rewards - 8 tokens divided among the players, and 3 coffers loosely worth 4 tokens each (in practice slightly less due to lack of choice). So you can expect 20/[8 people x 4 current tokens per item]=5/8 of an item per run. As an alternative, discounting that to account for increased certainty, E5S clears could reward solely 1 token and no coffers with all the E5S loot costing 2 of that token. This would also resolve the awkward party and chest system without speeding up gear progression. E6S-E8S and Alliance raid and dungeon drops are similarly solvable too, although they may need to be significantly more complicated.

It's likely SE has looked at those probabilities but prefers to keep the implementation in 'interesting' ways - but as with any firm, we tend to overestimate the rationality of behavior or how much information is being looked at.

I suspect that MMORPGs retain randomness in part as an artifact of tabletop heritage, but it does seem to be diminishing over time.