I haven't visited RMS in forever, but I felt the need to step in here and help clarify a distinction that I don't feel a lot of people are able to make. I'm not here to talk about whether or not Anima is a good or a bad server, everyone knows my opinion already, and arguing such things becomes a matter of perspective, and doesn't get anyone anywhere except angry.
I'm here to talk about game balance.
Many people claim that MVP cards and the like are obscenely unbalanced, and ruin the way the game works. Most people fall back on the concept that they were meant to be rare items, not items that everyone should have, but I think the biggest problem with this argument is that Gravity did not successfully balance such items to begin with, and I even think that a system that allows the majority of players to have access to the top-level end of gear is superior to one where only a minute few (By comparison) ever attain access to such items.
Let's look at this from the way one would get MVP gear on a server that doesn't allow players to get any MVP items through any method other than getting the cards from the kills. Lets assume that the server is a 1x, since most of the people here seem to be interested in the low-rate competition.
Golden Thief Bug card is one of the most sought-after prizes throughout most servers, and one of the most disputed when it comes to balancing it with the rest of the game.
On a low-rate, non-donation server, GTB drops his card at a 1/10,000 rate. For a player to get such a card, there is only one solution: Be very, very lucky. The lucky player, the one-in-a-million (Or should I say one-in-ten-thousand), will end up nabbing this rare gem of a card, and suddenly, this player is on an elevated status over every other single player on the server.
When someone gets an MVP card, and it does happen, that single player becomes a very valuable commodity, and he can use the card to his advantage, or sell it for a ridiculous price to other players who might be far richer, and can thus afford to fork over the cash. The player in question now has a large amount of character wealth for no other reason than that he is lucky, and there is now an MVP card on the server to "imbalance" things.
With a limited number of cards on a server, it means that the vast majority of players on the server are at a massive disadvantage, because there are lucky or rich players out there who have the ridiculous advantage of MVP carded equipment, and for another player to approach their power level, it either takes far more skill than the player in question, or it takes an equivalent level of gear... and on such a server you have no way of equalizing that power.
So here, on your non-donation server, are a select few players who are more-or-less gods among men, who have significant and unmatched advantages over other players... advantages that can't be countered. The cards are there, and are possessed by the few.
While a donation item server may not be perfect, look at what it creates instead. Because Anima in particular has a wide array of ways to earn donation-level gear, the items are available to a much higher percentage of players, which means while the average power level of the player base does jump dramatically, it means that any given player has a fighting chance to be on a competitive level, and doesn't have to rely on a one-in-however-many-thousand rare item drop to do it.
So tell me again that having widely available MVP equipment is more imbalanced than leaving it up to luck, because the numbers I see are telling me otherwise.
