The most widely accepted criteria to be able to lot on gear in this game has always been “are you able to equip it?”. Sadly it’s never been “are you able to equip it, and will you actually bring the job you can equip it on to events, and are you skilled at playing that job effectively?” in other words “will you put it to good use?” or will it sit in your mog safe or, even better, in your list of claim slip key items? I’m reminded of one particular player, whereupon being told that he could not lot a Hydra Haubert because he did not have PLD at 70+ went out and leveled PLD to 70 (and no further) before the next Dynamis-Tavnazia. Not because he wanted to play PLD in a capacity that would help his LS, but just so he could Get Shit™. To the best of my knowledge that person didn’t even use AB, but the fact remains that AB is a dangerous tool in the hands of anyone wishing to mimic that sort of behavior. I’ve already witnessed cases of people “doing it in reverse” where they speedlevel a job with AB before a given event just to secure lotting rights, and then worry later about fleshing out the job to make it playable. Again, you can say that this behavior is inevitable w/out AB in the forumla, but AB helps make it happen faster and more often than ever before.

It’s almost the same case as the Modus Vertias exploit. Nobody was actively cheating because that’s how Modus Veritas works. SE only patched it because you could potentially one-shot their precious baby AV, not to mention any other challenging NM they’ve created.

I’m partly in agreement with Ascule. Bad players are bad, and you really can’t fix them by making them do standard XP parties to 75. That said, the quick fix can turn a good player bad, too, especially if they’re gonna make the job they’re astral burning up a main. Dedicated ones will go out and cap their stuff and learn the ins and outs, but most aren’t dedicated and expect you to dote on them for having the job no matter how good they are at it. You see a lot more of the latter than the former, especially if they’re after a maat’s cap.

This is why I dislike loot systems based solely on points. It’s incredibly easy to exploit the system to get whatever you want for whatever job you want even if you don’t ever plan on using it, and it leads to dissatisfaction from the ones who will actually make use of the stuff.

I still maintain that the practice is illegal, should’ve been bannable a long time ago, but, of course, since basically every American player of any real time in the game appears to either be cheating or suspicious of such, Square-Enix is going to let the rest of us get ass-raped for it.

Fact is, it’s worse because of one simple reason: We haven’t seen another set of massive banhammers in a year. If Square-Enix took five minutes to actually enforce it’s ToS, they’d have to consolidate servers.

Ascule: Fact is, there aren’t that many good players left, especially in the English-speaking countries. Most of them either got banned for cheating, will get banned for cheating, or quit the game because they know they were (or will be) in one of the two former groups.

The one thing Astral Burning has done is make me double check whenever I see someone with a new 75 job to make sure that they actually know the job and have their skills capped. SMNs are especially bad since almost all new SMNs are AB’ed and do not have capped skills, so they are nearly useless on that job. To me, a Maat’s cap is now actually a warning sign that the person may not actually know how to play their job ~.~

Competition for gear, and inflated AH prices on the other hand, are definitely an issue. The number of SMNs out there camping the Yin-yang robe is scary now, and with people quitting left and right, there are fewer people around to farm materials, fish for materials and craft high level gear. So, this ends up with inflated prices for high level equipment.

People won’t know the nuances of a job from Astral Burning to 75, but you can likely pick them up in much less than the time spent in a more traditional grind to 75 in TP burn parties.

Then again, I haven’t been playing much lately, so things being worse wouldn’t surprise me much.