(09-04-2015, 01:56 PM)Telluride Wrote: I'll grant you that point. We've already brought up most of the content locks in other threads, so it seemed a fresh example, though one could just as well ask why rooms/houses should be GC Rank-locked at all, for that matter, at which point it stops being about difficulty and starts being about time investment, which is a completely different discussion, and one I imagine we'll probably be much more in agreement over.
The challenge then becomes "what is this new person doing with their time if they aren't playing the game?" Ranking up at your GC is something you may or may not be doing on the side as you level and play through dungeons. AV is a good source of gear, experience, and is required for Grand Company progression. I'll grant you that they didn't have to lock it at all, but I suspect it was partially to make sure that people kept playing their game. There's a lot of strange level/MSQ locks that are to be blamed solely on gil sellers, and as mentioned above the requirement for AV was in before housing to be max rank.
I know it's a slippery slope fallacy, but why even bother needing to pay for a room at all? If you've already spent millions on a house, why not just open instances to members? The answer's the same: They want people playing, not just logging in once a week to look at their house. I wasn't trying to infer any sort of True Player Society or anything, I just miss the days where hard shit was either beaten or it wasn't, and there was a modicum of pride of being able to say you beat something tough. I confess "difficult" is incredibly subjective, but that's a discussion for another thread. Before we had patches and the like, you either beat the game or you didn't. Seeing the True Ending to Kingdom Hearts meant something before Youtube. Conquering secret bosses in RPGs was a badge of honor. I will concede that this is slightly apples to oranges; Steps is hardly Demifiend-from-DDS level difficulty, but I think the thought is the same. "This is hard, and I don't want to / can't do it, but I want what comes after it."
Comes back around to my not understanding not wanting to play the game. I just think of the less-fun stuff as the Sewer Level of MMOs.
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