"Revamped" Rewards System

[Mijin]

While the details have yet to be finalized, Yoshida did discuss a bit about his plans for the new rewards system in a recent media interview. He said that for the overall path for how adventurers increase their strength, they're creating a flow where you would earn tokens via content to purchase equipment. Then, using that new gear, would be able to take on challenges for rare items, and once complete, challenge ever harder content to really become powerful. Players should be able to achieve the first objective, and then really challenge themselves on the higher difficulty content.

As soon as we have more concrete examples or details, we'll be sure to pass them along!

It’s is basically what I was afraid of. This system is a carbon copy of WoW’s horse-and-carrot rewards system to keep people constantly replacing their gear sets. I assume since they’re following WoW so closely in this aspect, and several others for that matter, they will also follow in their footsteps of releasing new content every several weeks that replaces the old “best gear” entirely forcing you into a never ending cycle of collecting completely new gear sets.

I can’t help but suspect this system is going to further undermine crafters as well. If everyone is gearing up by doing low end dungeons to gain the user accepted “gear rating” to raid, people are going to lose a need for crafted gear. I would also venture to guess that the current gear you have already worked so hard to obtain will probably be made obsolete at the launch date.

In any case; WoW fans will rejoice, and FFXI fans (aka the majority of people interested in FFXIV) will be much less pleased. Of course I'm speculating about a few things here so I'll retain some optimism, but for the record, as Rukkirii just confirmed, my speculations turn our to be true more than not.