Quote Originally Posted by Demon6324236 View Post
In all honesty most of what you just said is based on the idea you have money before hand, which is fine, most do, but new players are unable to do much of what you said because they can not afford it, for instance the lv7 leather armor you mentioned, which is unaffordable even if you level just outside of your home country and NPC everything, which a new player is likely to do. This problem does not effect current players, but rather new players, and seeing as this game does need new players, it is quite the concern.
I have to disagree with this, since this is almost exactly what I did when I started a few years ago. I didn't know about the AH, never clicked on it, since I was thinking it would be like FF6 and 9 and i knew I didn't have a lot of gil to spend. Maybe I got lucky since I started in Windurst, but I farmed crawlers to make my money. 300 gil for turning in silk thread from crawlers. Got lucky every now and then with crawler calculus stones. The few times I ran into skeletons and got bone chips, turned them into bone hairpins (wind crystal + chip), then NPC'd them for like 120 gil.

Yes, my way was slow, but I wasn't in any real rush. It could be that I am more patient than a lot of players, that I do the tedious grind and don't really care about rushing into endgame. Methods are out there if you are looking to build a slow and steady income instead of waiting for that one big windfall.