Pre-BC legendary weapons were similar. They required a combination of materials, drops and crafting. Although, now legendary weapons have been "demoted" to just drops off bosses.

Well, what you say might indeed be a part of the issue, but the bigger reason is that FFXI has what? Half a million players? It may be more now, I'm not sure. But, my point still stands. WoW has nearly 10 million subscribers. Of course there's going to be more of these kind of people in WoW.

I always have considered the FFXI community far superior than the WoW community, and that, IMO is one of the biggest draws to the game now. If I happen to go back to FFXI, that will be the reason. And you're right, part of the reason is because it forces you to group for 90% of your accomplishments, and if you don't act at least somewhat mature, you're likely to not progress. Reputation is more important in FFXI (and I mean your reputation as a person or character). The more you're known and liked, the better off you'll be when it comes to finding groups. WoW can all be solo play, if you wish, so people don't really have to be accountable for their actions and attitude.

However, that same thing that makes the FFXI community so great, is also a drawback to certain types of gamers because it means you almost always have to get a group to do anything productive. This takes time, and lots of it (too much for my tastes, thus why I quit).

Also, I dislike when people equate time to difficulty. Just because you have more time on your hands and/or are willing to spend more time playing an MMO, doesn't mean the things you accomplish are any more difficult.

Time =/= difficulty.

It isnt just time that makes relic weapons hard, you have to actively work for them all the time and it takes that long. It doesnt simply take years, see the hundreds or millions of gil I noted, plus some NM fights, rare drops.. etc. Probably the most important thing in FFXI is making friends or finding a linkshell with people you like. If you do that you wont have any trouble finding a group, if its exp,missions,quest etc you're looking to do. I leveled DRG(when it wasnt so popular) and PUP in no time, the two jobs that complain about seeking the most.

I will admit though that sometimes getting missions done can take time(even I wont help with most CoP missions because of caps). But they finally added some rewards to them for people who have already done them, so even that isnt as bad anymore.

Sorry, i didn't mean to inspire an all out debate.... Just was expressing my opinion on why i thought FFXI was a better game. Basically the way i see it is this, wow appeals to a much larger crowd, but in my experience the mainstream crowd usually has bad taste.

While WoW has alot of good things going for it, the things that attract such a large maintream crowd, i.e. the ease of leveling, the fact that more than 3/4 the game is soloable, heck even raiding is easier now because they lowered by almost half the amount of people you need to do it, makes most of the people attracted to the game the kind who don't really care about the other people in it and just want the "ph4t l00tz". Which really defeats the purpose of an MMO, i can get phat lootz all day long on a single player game, the only difference is that people in WoW can brag about it to other people who play WoW.

So basically after playing the game into end content i really just felt that the only thing that made WoW different than some single player game was that raiding actually took some connections to do.

On the other hand, FFXI makes you feel like you are actually accomplising something that you can't in a single player game, it gives you that real MMO experience. WoW has become the "pop punk" or "emo" of the genre and people eat it up. They have no clue where the genre came from or what it was supposed to be for in the first place. Guess i have just never been one for mainstream reasoning..... I know i must sound old saying things like that, but i'm only 25....