While I love FFXIV it seems to be failing as a multiplayer MMO. So why not make part of it single player? They have the basic code, they have the graphics, they have the ai, etc. All they would need is a few more graphics, a new story, and some cutscenes.
Imagine an epic cutscene-based movie like expansion that makes it feel like you're playing a -normal- final fantasy. And when i say movie like i don't mean 40 min long cutscenes. I mean an epic save-the-world storyline with actual reoccuring characters that help you fight, backstories to the chars, in-depth lore, and LOTS of zones. The zones can even be instanced as long as they are somewhat new and creative (in order to prevent the costs of expanding servers or making them server compatible). The world is so huge that they could choose from different areas to hold the story. For example you might be responsible for liberating ala-mihgo. Or maybe you have to save the world from the threat of a dragon war. Or they can just make an entirely new area and have the story there.
I know it seems like a stupid idea for an MMO but think about how many non-mmo players it would pull in who might stay -after- finishing the story. Essentially you should be able to do the entire single player (30-50 hours gameplay?) with one job and by the end have that job near max. So current players would get to level up another job while experiencing the single player mode, and new players would be able to level up and get to end game without boring grinding.
Main point is if SE markets the game as a single player mode with a different name + 1-month free, they could easily draw in 800k+ new players overnight. And a large amount of those would probably stick around to play the MMO part afterwords.
It would also make FFXIV unique compared to every other MMO.
People seem to be missing the point. Yoshi P has said you should be able to play casually and choose to solo in this game. So I'm arguing that instead of having all solo as grinding and repeated leve quests, they create a 'solo expansion' that allows you to take one job max via solo through a deep storyline comparable to non-onlne ff titles. If you think thats a bad idea then explain why people would rather grind the same mobs for 40 hours over playing an interesting story for 30 or 40.