Quote Originally Posted by Rustic View Post
I look at it this way. When you have something that literally negates the entire level-up process in favor of a few guys swinging AoE's all day...something has broken. Badly. Think about it.

You have a brief soloing period, a few cycles of parties in two-three specific zones...and then you have a system of gaining exp so good that people happily are paying millions of Gil just to be able to skip straight to 99. On multiple jobs.

We're going to have a legion of Geomancer and Rune Fencers who barely know which end to use for nose-picking if this isn't changed, not to mention the effective crippling of play that's already happened. Why bother with gear you may barely use for an hour, or playing a job prior to having all the benefits of L99 funtimes once you get past 10th or so and jump through the brief FoV hoops on the way to Cleave-O-Rama? Sure, the level caps are gone in most areas. That's OK. Most of the reasons to be in those areas has been obliterated in the process. Big ol' bad-boy mobs in old areas? Nobody cares. There's no reason to exp in those areas anyway, nor much of use in them at this point.

The guy with the great axe knows he's the key to the state of "normal" in FFXI play at this point. I'm not surprised he's milking it for all it's worth, and the fact that it costs big money is just a huge sign saying "RMT me!" as people who want to be "normal" with 99 job levels are jumping straight on the buy-a-top-job bandwagon.

That's just wrong. Even with all the (good) changes we had towards making leveling up easier, somehow we've ended up with them being tossed aside in favor of alliances worth leeching their way to the top of their jobs, barely twitching in the process. Further, this means there's no real cycle of building up Gil, gear, whatever. Just whip through the level breaks and you're done...in need of gear, but done. Psst, need some Gil to buy that gear?

All of it points towards creating immense demand for RMT-supplied product at the top of the food chain. That's cancer. The cure is probably needed before the next expansion comes out, and honestly, if FFXI hadn't gone through the chaos of FFXIV's ups and downs and dev-team-eating-shenanigans, I think we'd have seen FC's as a method of totally bypassing the job-leveling process eliminated months ago.
Development Plans

With all that said, to make it easy to understand, we will be redefining and deciding on themes for the below points:

* Content structure
* Jobs overall
* How to add stats to items
* How to hand out rewards


I'd personally like to see players that are below level 99 reach level 99 quickly (we will be looking into whether we can make adjustments so that the level 95 limit quest can be completed solo), and for players that have reached level 99, I’d like to create separate elements such as solo, group, casual, hardcore, and provide game play after defining themes for new elements and adjusted elements.
The idea is that the game is old and mostly focused on end game content these days. They want new players to get leveled up fast, THEN learn what end of the spear to pick their nose with. How jobs play changes drastically between levels 1 and 99. The lack of focus on mid-game content means a player is better off just learning how things work in end game these days. Assuming there are players around to help the newer people learn how to play end game properly, it's better for them because they're not stuck grinding xp (likely solo) for a year to level one job and then find out no one wants it for anything end game. Farming can be done at any level, and pre-blinker nerf It was actually possible to make back most of what one spent in a cleave in the first place.
Despite cleaving, there are still GoV parties and standard abby parties still happening, you just have to know where to look. Often these parties are going almost non-stop and constantly replacing people, and instead of shouting they just pick up people waiting in line in the area.
Good day.
(On a side note, is it possible to lock the thread down before the relevant information gets completely buried? It was made for one purpose, and that purpose has been met thanks to Okipuit.)