Quote Originally Posted by Sol_Aureus View Post
First there was Darkhold: a spamable dungeon with a 100% chance to get loot at the end from each chest. Everyone had full sets of everything from that dungeon within a month easily, then sat around twiddling their thumbs waiting for new content again.
I wasn't around when Darkhold was implemented, but I get the creeping feeling that it was alone when implemented.
Next there was Ifrit: a spamable fight with instanced chests so everyone got a chance to get an item. Problem is, it's a random item so you might not even be able to use it. It was incredibly frustrating when within our first 10 runs our tank got the staff and I got the sword. We'd love to have traded, but the items drop directly into our inventories so we can't even help our friends. So you have a low chance of getting a drop (let's be generous and say 10%) with a 1/7 (14%) chance on top of that that it's the drop you want. That's a 1.4% chance of getting the item you want. Later on they added Inferno Totems so you could save up for an item you actually wanted or pass the totem to your friend to help them get something they wanted. Good idea, but the problem again is that it's a random chance drop with a lower end drop rate and you need 10 of them.

Next was Moogle, another spamable fight whose loot system was a carbon copy of Ifrit's and has the same problems because of it.
Making one fight the entire "content" is most of the time a bad idea in and of itself. It's worked very rarely and under very specific set ups (See: Vault of Archavon, Obsidian Sanctum, Eye of Eternity). Not to mention it requires being part of a greater amount of content.
Followed by Aurum Vale and Cutter's Cry: spamable dungeons with abysmally low drop rates. One of the absolute worst types of content in any MMO in my opinion. It's a cheap and lazy way to prolong content and create faux difficulty. The sad part about this is I loved Aurum Vale and liked Cutter's Cry (except for Chimera because of the fact that melee are practically worthless during the fight, but that's a different discussion). The dungeons were cool and had interesting mechanics in them that made them stand out. But then they were ruined by the fact that they were spamable. Darklight has such an abysmally low drop rate that players have to spam the dungeon for a chance at it. This is not fun. This is tedious and burns players out on these dungeons really really quickly.
Spammable dungeons wouldn't be bad, were it not for the fact that they're still on their own. Now would the people in this game feel better if you had seven or eight lv50 dungeons with 24 hour lockouts? I can't really say. Wouldn't bother me at all, but I've played under such a system before.

And this is what worries me. Every single bit of endgame content we have right now is spamable. Because it's spamable, if they want to make the items you obtain by doing this content be "rare," it must have low drop rates. If it didn't, everyone would have full sets of everything again and there would be no sense of pride for getting gear because it's common. The problem is, this content does not reward skillful play or effort. The content instead rewards people who are lucky. That is it.
With the amount of content they have, they can't really do much in terms of offering progression. I mean, you have 2 dungeons (that are prone to speed runs), two primal fights, a moogle fight and...that's it. Now if the two raid dungeons were massive and required several days to clear (which would require the introduction of raid IDs), then you might be able to get away with adding lock outs and increasing drop rates.

By the way, 2 days is too short, IMO. I'd go for the full 7 days, increase drops rates to 100%, add a mechanic to shard stuff to materia only while the drops is in the loot pool, create a larger loot pool to draw from and maybe even split stuff up between the different pieces of content so that players are encouraged to do all of it if they want to complete their sets.