Right, but we are talking about people specifically wanting a particular dungeon gear and the best way to go about that between them grinding the same dungeon over and over again or the ability to do every dungeon for variety should they will it, and still be able to get the dungeon armor they want. Like Retro said, it's about FUN. If you have one type of token, people actually have a choice which means they will get to do what they consider fun rather than constant grinding of one location which isn't fun at all for many people. We're not talking about putting in time for the top stats here which you can get those stats multiple ways as you guys just pointed out, we're talking aesthetics. If you want prestigious armor for bragging rights, armor that 'won't necessarily be accessible to everyone' make the Legendary Armor. They already did it for weapons so how would armor affect vertical progression? It already exists.
I don't understand why you view a potential Legendary Armor as so distinct from the tougher dungeon armors. Katoki, I'm sure he just meant more aesthetically distinct armors, not statistically better ones. So they are both prestige aesthetics; the exotic armors with equivalent stats are easily obtainable many other ways.
It's just a difference of opinion. I absolutely want Arah gear to be legitimtaely harder to get than AC gear. Your point about "what's difficult about repeating content" falls a little flat- Arah is just objectively the toughest dungeon. It's
hard. It feels satisfying to beat. It's not that seeing more Arah gear everywhere would be bad or ruin the game, it would just lose the meaning that it has.
I think you might also have misinterpreted the point Katoki was trying to make with the majority/minority business. He wasn't talking about his anecdotal experience of playing with people, he was relating the anecdotal experience we all saw as
observers in the early days of the game. Before COF was nerfed to its still-easy-but-reasonable current form, COF gear was absolutely
everywhere. To the point where I consciously thought, "there's somebody who just took the path of least resistance" immediately upon seeing it. It also put me off from wanting any of that gear for a long time- until Halloween, actually, when it was notably less common, and even then I went for a less common usage of it (the medium shoulders are not visible if also wearing the chestpiece).
That's sort of the crux of the thing. Your anecdotal experience with the way
you want to run dungeons would make a universal token arrangement perfect for you. But you're framing it in terms of the game-runners' perspective. And the tragic truth is that a massive number of gamers will take the path of least resistance offered, regardless of "fun," regardless of "honor," even regardless of
legitimacy, as seen in the regular use and patching of exploits.
The net effect would almost undoubtedly not be an increase in the running of all paths because you could now get any armor with tokens from any dungeon- instead, the masses would converge on the easiest runs to an even greater extent than they are now- making it, for the primest example, even tougher to get a good Arah group than it is now, because you wouldn't need to run Arah to get Arah gear anymore. I hope that makes sense.
I do still see a sliding scale for token conversion to be a reasonable compromise. The key is that it's still
tougher on an objective basis to get some aesthetics than others. The concept of "everything for everybody" is laudable but I believe it should really only extend to a certain point- stat parity, and a variety of options for looks- both of which already exist to a huge degree.
Some things need to be harder to obtain.
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