Revamp the way we gain experience points

[FrankReynolds]

This game isn't being flooded by new players, and if all the old players start to leave because they FEEL like they have nothing to do (even if they might have stuff to do but don't want to do it), the game will start to depopulate.

I felt like I had nothing to do back when the level cap was 75 even though I only had like 5 jobs leveled on my main. The reason? Because getting the jobs that I was less interested in up to level cap seemed like a giant boring, tedious grind. After they released abyssea, I went and leveled a bunch of jobs that I had previously ignored just because it was easy to level them. Guess what? It turns out that some of them are fun, so I started gearing and practicing playing them. Now I have tons of new job quests to do, AF sets to build and gear to chase because I actually like some of these jobs that I had previously ignored due to the effort required just to try them out.

For example, when I leveled Ninja to 45 for a subjob many years ago, I hated it. But after I leveled it in abyssea while my LS was farming chests, I started to like it. Now I play it as much as I can. If I had been stuck playing RDM, BLM, BRD, WHM, MNK and THF all this time, I would have p[robably lost it a long time ago.


TLDR; a lot of new players never got into the game because leveling took too long. Can't win em all.

[Rustic]

I felt like I had nothing to do back when the level cap was 75 even though I only had like 5 jobs leveled on my main. The reason? Because getting the jobs that I was less interested in up to level cap seemed like a giant boring, tedious grind. After they released abyssea, I went and leveled a bunch of jobs that I had previously ignored just because it was easy to level them. Guess what? It turns out that some of them are fun, so I started gearing and practicing playing them. Now I have tons of new job quests to do, AF sets to build and gear to chase because I actually like some of these jobs that I had previously ignored due to the effort required just to try them out.

For example, when I leveled Ninja to 45 for a subjob many years ago, I hated it. But after I leveled it in abyssea while my LS was farming chests, I started to like it. Now I play it as much as I can. If I had been stuck playing RDM, BLM, BRD, WHM, MNK and THF all this time, I would have p[robably lost it a long time ago.

Of course, even if this very day we said NO SOUP FOR YOU and locked Abyssea to 75+ characters...people would STILL be leveling faster than they did in the bad old days. You could sit there on your I-don't-want-you-in-my-exp-PT-forever-alone job of choice from that era now and be guaranteed a steady rate of exp gain.

I don't care what job you are. Given baseline equipment, you can kill EP mobs. If you can kill it and it gives exp, all it takes is a GoV/FoV page and you're looking at advancement at a pace that isn't grindingly agonizing. For anyone.

That's good. It's the overwhelming mass exp generation that is Abyssea that's broken, where players literally don't have to move for 69 levels straight from one place, in perfect safety while the guy with the great axe and his healer lulz their way through for you. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't just bot the healer and auto-level 17 people with one guy twoboxing his computer (yes, botting illegal. Someone should tell all the fishers I keep seeing that.). No threats. No worries. Just dingdingdingding hey I'm 99 now, YAY I R TEH SPECIALZ!

Abyssea's exp system wasn't a "fix" for grinding. It was the death of the exp system, period, reducing the process to something of a zero-risk proposition for 16 people at once. GoV/FoV was the fix.

Abyssea was like having the human race become immortal and invulnerable, followed by GoV/FoV's discovery of the cure for cancer.