Quote Originally Posted by Fawkes View Post
The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates
For the most part, certain mobs dropped certain fragments, so they were very easy to farm. You could form parties to do it or reflect farm. In fact some party members would do this while you were doing other things, giving you fragments in the process.

Another option was to get Lost Doom and spam it on a boss. Eventually it would 1 shot them and you'd get loads of fragments.

Of course, many other fragments could simply be bought with clusters or looted from CLL.

And finally, for the ones you couldn't get, you could simply go to the market board and buy them.
on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil
Maybe they could have not bothered with the Appraisal system and maybe they should avoid that if they do it again, but the rest was fine in my opinion. 100 billion is an exaggeration though. There were some rare ones, but at least when the content was current (pre-Echo where it was more useful), prices were lower.