DarkswordDX wrote:
Quote:
it quickly becomes a matter of can or can't, with the can't too often a matter of factors outside their control.
Not everyone having something is what gives a thing its value.
How much is a billion dollars worth if you gave a billion dollars to everyone? Like relic weapons in XI - some things are prized precisely because they were so far out of reach for so many. I never got one,
knew I would never get one, never tried to get one, and was slightly awed by those who really did put in the time, effort, and gil as I should have been.
Everyone should shoot for the moon, but there's no shame in not everyone making it. They need to quit holding it against those who do, and I say that as a casual player myself. That's not the good, motivating kind of envy. Its the poor-loser kind of envy. Those who exceed and excel should be looked up to and perhaps surpassed by those who have the drive. Not held back so nobody gets their feelings hurt.
I'm certainly not looking to hold people back. Rather, to use the old axiom, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Right now, MMOs err more toward there being only one way, which is usually the whole Raid or GTFO thing. Thing is, for every "no" that pops up for alternative proposals, it's not only removing options, but trivializing preference and effort in a way appropriate to my earlier Nintendo example. If the eventual thought process is the guy at the bottom of the corporate ladder doesn't matter, then how many rungs could we chop off before the guys at the top start sweating? Like it or not, those "losers" matter. They're paying the winner's bills.
In practice, the people "winning" now would still be winning, winning not only more swiftly, but more often. If you want to correlate people getting their priorities straight and dumping content they dislike as holding others back, then yes, that will happen to a degree. Not everyone wants to be the ***** of a "winner" as was often the case in XI's relic acquisition process. Not everyone wants the people helping them to be short-changed, either, which led to a bit of deviance from pure RNG to the token systems we see today. But that's only one step, we need to keep climbing higher.
I could make some cheesy pun that this isn't reality, it's Final Fantasy, but the truth is it's escapism. Let's not start emulating the ****** aspects of RL through game mechanics. Looking up to vets can still be a thing. There can still be lofty goals. However, none of this 1% crap. If 100% of the content can't be accessed and experienced with fair effort, it's not content worth developing. That's not me asking for welfare, hand-outs, or whatever. It's me acknowledging people are different, but shouldn't be treated differently. Let their in-game behavior and the resulting social ramifications decide that.