Originally Posted by
FrankReynolds
Right, but here is the thing: If you make leveling take forever, people will only level a few key jobs in order to ensure a place in end game, then they will stop leveling and concentrate on endgame. This creates a situation where in new people only have other new people to level with because older players have effectively quit leveling. That's where the game was at before abyssea was released.
The problem with creating end game content in this situation is that you can't create end game events that require job diversity because most people only have a few jobs leveled and most of them are the same jobs. They aren't willing to spend months years leveling for one event. Even if they are, you are looking at months / years lag time before your end game event picks up in popularity (if ever).
As they add more new jobs, this problem becomes worse and worse because they have to give those jobs a reason to exist beyond just the leveling phase and creating mid level content is problematic because the usefulness of the rewards is short lived and level capped players don't like playing at lower levels.
They solve this by making it incredibly easy to level jobs by having higher level players help you. This way, lower level people aren't stuck sitting with their flags up all day doing nothing and the devs can build content around any jobs they want because everyone can reasonably access those jobs.
They could have easily brought back the six man party system by adding a point system that revolves around killing things outside of abyssea and is most efficiently done in groups of 4-6 by making it scale like exp. does. They could have tied it to merits as a form of progression. They could have done this with reives by simply making the bayld received scale based on party size.
There are a million things they could have done better than what they did to keep people playing and none of it had to involve going back in time and removing fell cleave parties or building a new game engine.