The world of Final Fantasy XI

Level 1-13ish around your home nation. Get into a alliance party from 13-30. Abyssea to 99. Other than Adoulin, experincing the rest of the content is a possibility on the linkshell you get into. This is what this wide wide world of FFXI has been reduced to. A hand full of areas. This is simply the result of 3 things. 1. Not forcing completion of content. 2. No restrictions on Aby leveling. 3. Not SCALING previous content as you released new content.

When abyssea was released, alot of content and the worth of alot of items simply died. The way to keep these things relevant was to ease on the drop rate, the cost, and to force completion of certain things before the new content was accessible. Give a half a year warning. Introduce npcs that say clearly, you'll need "this weapon" or "this key item from completing this and this" to enter. No. Instead they just focus on the new content. Any new person can just walk in, skip most everything and waltz into abyssea. Actions by the dev team like this resulted in things like the year of "renewed" Salvage, Einherjar, and Nyzul, to fly over most people's heads. If anyone needed to level a new job, why experience nation missions, af1, dynamis, etc. when it's not needed and it's not nearly as good as AF3. This pattern has continued on up until now and Adoulin is released.

Thanks for the difficulty in Adoulin. For the first month I and the rest of the hardcore players loved it. However, hardcore players, more than anyone, will probably be the first to take periodic breaks. Here's what i'm seeing since I've done just that. I'm seeing, 80% of the day, the population on my server hovers @ 950 people. Adoulin, Voidwatch, and Legion battlegrounds are all designed around at least 18 people. So out of this 950 i can probably accurately say 1/3 are afk, and 1/3 probably don't speak the language i do. That leaves around 317ish people. Out of those 317 i have to hope that 18 have the bayld, the time, and the want to do a wildskeeper reive. Or delve. Or skirmish(chuckle). Now what if i want to do legion.... or voidwatch... or meeble... (tears in my eyes by this point).

I don't think it's fair to the players who can't handle delve that you haven't forced content upon them, made a system that they can get to the most recent content in a matter of a week, and expect that they play like veterans. I admit i was on board with it at first, but the FFXI team and I were both at fault in this thinking. Now we have the consequences. The few shouts I've seen in the last few days attempting to gather a group of people have ended in failure very often.

The world is massive and it'd be hard to find a game to rival this one in pure content size. The restrictions are all in the wrong place though. The restrictions are stopping people from going to salvage by themselves. The drop rates are making people not even want to spend 100k cruor on weakness items to go low man voidwatch(cause how are we supposed to get cruor that easily now?). And yet, people are supposed to explore this or don't come to adoulin. Also, wiki has become our enemy. Too often does one need to look something up in wiki. "Find this random place somewhere in Yorcia Weald." Bitch what??? Place doesn't even have adequate maps and you can't even give me an approximate "in the northeast" at least? That's why I'll never complete that dark horse thing unless it's by pure luck. I'm not spending an hour simply looking around for things. I'm sorry. It's not fun. I digress.

Level up restrictions for abyssea. Something like every multiple of 5 under level 75 has to be done outside of abyssea. That would force people to explore areas of the game to level up. To level past 75 you need to have completed nation missions and at least one or more bosses from sea, sky, or dynamis. That would force people to need adequate gear from level 75 and crafting items around that level would have.... Value.

The biggest point I could make is, as a veteran player, I know that if I started a new character, alot of the content(and gear) would be nearly impossible to get due to lack of interest/knowledge from other players(not to mention something like voidwatch where it'd probably take 2000+ fights just to get 3 or 4 pieces of gear is a joke). How even more true would this be for a newer player who doesn't know where the majority of the population is at game-wise? The FFXI team has done a bad job... ignored scaling previous content and items' accessibility.

Sorry for the long post. Most of my comments are concerning the general English speaking population. Japan clearly has the largest audience, but without the English-Speaking audience a very large portion of funds would cease to exist. It is for that reason I felt I needed to speak up. I'm sure SE would love to being making a good profit off of both FFXI and FFXIV at the same time.

FFXI Content

Battle
Abyssea
Assault
Besieged
BCNM, KCNM, KSNM, HKCNM
Campaign
Conquest
Delve
Dynamis
Einherjar
Legion
Limbus
Meeble Burrows
Reives
Salvage
Sea NMs
Skirmishes
Sky NMs
Stronghold NMs
Voidwalker NMs
Voidwatch
Walk of Echoes
Zeni NMs

Missions
Bastok
Windurst
San d'Oria
Rise of the Zilart
Chains of Promathia
Treasures of Aht Urhgan
Assault
Wings of the Goddess
Campaign
A Crystalline Prophecy
A Moogle Kupo d'Etat
A Shantotto Ascension
Seekers of Adoulin