The only thing this has hurt is the players trying to farm these points legit since now casuals are forced to waste an hour every day of the week or fall behind the hardcore folks. A weekly cap of 560 as opposed to a daily cap of 80 does not do anything to release casual and hardcore players from throttled content, it does however allow the flexibility of non-hardcore folks to have some possibility of catching up.
Uh... casuals who didn't make 3 full Ambuscade capes a month also fell behind. People got over it, and many of those casuals are still working away at their own pace on Ambu stuff like finishing capes, +2 armors, and Kaja/final stage weapons. Sometimes they get 0 or 2000 ambuscade points in an entire month, while hardcore players are getting 200,000 on day 1 after an update (and sure would have liked to be able to make TEN capes a month). All of this is fine.
I get that you WANT to be able to do stuff whenever you want during the week, but the devs are just practicing a pretty common modern design philosophy: provide some incentive for people to log in EVERY day. They don't care that it isn't the most convenient setup for you.
And come on, it's not like people don't have the possibility of catching up. 50 (very easy) dragon kills to get a potentially BiS accessory? OK, sounds fair enough. Especially when most of the more "casual" players might care more about like, 2 or 3 of the accessories. They can play a lot for a couple weeks and finish one in that timeframe, or do it more sporadically and maybe take 2-3 months or longer (just as they have done with things like Ambu gear that the hardcore would complete within hours of a monthly version update).
Quote:
Now what they have created is a situation where NEW players are forced to choose. Do they get the new accessories and crafting material to sell, or do they get abjurations and gear to kill the dragons with? And not only are they forced to choose one of those two options in the short-medium timeframe that is upcoming, they also have to play literally every single day to do so. If they don't, they risk falling even further behind or losing out on all that potential income that would help get their characters on track.
This is literally EVERYTHING in FFXI. Someone could farm Omen or Salvage for gil, or they could do high tiers for gear, or they could CP for JP/gifts to improve their job, or they could do Dynamis for JSE neck progress and item drops, or they could do Ambuscade for items/gil... There's ALWAYS a choice of how to prioritize your time. And quite frankly, DI is not really that bad in that if someone has only 15-20 minutes to play they can make some meaningful progress by getting a couple dragon kills in.
High end sellable DI crafting materials really weren't made for these more casual players anyway - they are for the hardcore, crafting bots, mules, etc. And the casual players aren't the market for the crafted gear, which is seemingly intentionally designed to be expensive and for the more hardcore players. If anything, it's nice that truly casual players have options to access (solo, even) some really BiS stuff - they don't have the option to get things of that level by themselves in other relatively recent content: they can't solo Omen bosses, get decent Ambuscade points without exorbitant effort, do higher difficulty HTBFs (and if they do VE, it's gonna take a huge chunk of their more limited time), even stuff like SR for the still valuable items that drop there. You even have to get 3 people to do some things like Vagary or Delve.
I think from the perspective of the "poor downtrodden casuals" that people here seem to want to defend as an excuse to complain about DI, this is actually a GREAT event since they can progress by themselves and get truly good rewards.