Older content is easier with SoA gearFollow

Every event you Listed is dead the moment you would rather tattoo you gentiles then do it again which happened to everyone but the got to catch em all crowd. The duel boxing thing has always been around it was just the RMTs that did it the most since reg players were scared of SE banning them, but as time went on and SE stop really giving a crap about windower so stop caring if people were DB. Really healing wasn't ever that hard if you had a brd that would keep ballad on the rdm, was it more involved then the DD yes but it was just boring as crap once you got into a cycle. FF14 has the same vertical gear progression as FFXI now and if SE is to be believed it has 1mil players. That tells me people care less about gear progression and more with how shinny it is. FFXI niche was never the side grade model it was the "Final Fantasy" name and the "Not" WoW, EVE, EQ.

Not really defending SoA or supporting ff14 so much as calling BS on SoA being the reason why the game is contracting. It still is SE's fault for wasting the money spent on ff14 that would had been better spent on getting rid of the PS2, POL, rebuilding the FFXI from the ground up.

Skirmish 2 offers gear that is just as good as delve and is far less restrictive.Only thing delve really offers over skirmish 2 is the weapons. Even gear in it's base form it is almost as good and can become better then boss drops(non-weapon gear) depending on the augments you can get.If you are drk, war, blm, sch(nuking staff still need the stun staff from trials), geo you can get you main weapon off the AH for a few mil. and that price keeps dropping.

It's hard to argue with that. If you have all the drops you want and have insufficient incentive to farm for gil/help friends, then sure the content is dead. But if that's your definition of dead content, then it's something that should be judged on a player-by-player basis. Abyssea brought about easier XP, which meant that people who only had 1-2 level 75 jobs could suddenly level many new jobs. All these players with freshly-leveled jobs created a greater desire for gear.

Looking at myself, I played BRD for many years. It was the only job I cared to level because I hated XPing. Abyssea let me level many new jobs while keeping my sanity. It allowed me to try many new jobs, but it also meant that I needed SCH gear. Or DRG gear. All of a sudden I had an interest in picking up a Novio or working on Arch-Omega or picking up Cfeet. I also decided that I wanted to make a Ryunohige.

Both of us have a story, and neither story speaks for the entire playerbase. I would argue that between Abyssea and Adoulin, many players had interest in many different events because so much gear was needed for so many jobs. Players would make Empyrean weapons for many of their jobs, not just their favorite. It was possible to level and gear a passable BLU to get into VW shouts. Dynamis was worth farming because a relic weapon was not out of even a casual player's reach. I'm not saying these were the best of times or even the good times. But there really was a lot to do and I disagree that all this content was dead before Adoulin.