Time to stop making synced content

[AdamFyi]

WHY?

It’s generally to prevent the content from being steamrolled i.e. undersizing older content. Other than that, it’s to keep the impact of item level variance at the absolute minimum. By keeping the sync level low, more players are able to participate and also makes it significantly easier to balance when every player that enters is set to a predefined expected stat value.

I'm on team "sync shouldn't null materia but otherwise idc," personally, but you and I understand intentions of Unreal quite differently.

It’s most likely just to prevent materia cheesing. They probably don’t have a way to sync materia that gets slotted into gear yet so disabling it probably was their best option. Being able to bring, say, a crafted level 80 pentamelded set with Grade 7&8 crit materia (+180 crit rate) to something like Sastasa doesn’t sound like a good idea.