Came back today after a few Years. Any activity in the game? Any good forums?

[bungiefanNA]

The game became topheavy after being out for 8+ years, and most veteran players having all the jobs geared and leveled that they wanted to play. It became harder to find people at the lower levels, hence level sync and later QoL changes. Old content was designed for old level caps, and leveling was designed to be a grind because of the limited amount of content besides leveling until ~4 expansions were out. Now there's dozens of endgame activities, so they didn't want leveling to be a multi-month grind if you were a new player recruited by veterans. If it would take you 4-6 months of play to even be able to join your friends, you'd likely move on to something else, as the competition had faster leveling to actually be able to join other players.

Leveling to 99 is now about 20-30 hours of play, since EXP is doubled as of 2013, plus the number of other EXP boosts you have from Eschad Ring, Qultada and Kupofried Trusts, the 180% EXP boost from Rhapsodies of Vanadiel, and the occasional double EXP campaign. This month I've been in Crawler's Nest killing things for 5000 EXP per kill. You won't play for months to start playing the game. 1 week and you will be 99 with a set of level 117 armor and weapons, allowing you to start on events that other players do. As of Abyssea's release, they give you a nearly free set of armor just below max level that is adequate for starting the new content in the latest expansion. When they released the first part of Abyssea and raised the level cap to 80, they released 3 sets of level 78 armor that only cost a few thousand cruor, which you would earn while leveling in Abyssea. In December 2013 they did the same thing with the armor from Records of Eminence vendors, 3 sets that cover all jobs and are nearly free with currency you earn while leveling.

Abyssea is where they decided that they were tired of the census showing that most people had a level 75 job, but most people hadn't completed an entire storyline, stopping as far as it took to unlock the zones people used for events (Limbus, Nyzul Isle, Ru'Aun, etc). So they started making it easy to speed through the old content that had been out almost 10 years and the majority of players hadn't finished. To do so, they had to speed leveling up.

Also, with the game being topheavy, the market for low level equipment on the auction house collapsed, so they had to give alternate ways of obtaining equipment as you leveled, which is what Records of Eminence did, by having some objectives reward with armor and by having the NPCs sell armor and weapons for every level for Sparks.

Any MMO that is out for so long will become topheavy, and the usual way to deal with it is to speed up leveling for new players so they can catch up. It can be slow at release, but it needs to speed up to allow new players to catch up to the curve.

Yes, you can only start a character in the 3 starting cities, because they can't be guaranteed that you have every expansion registered. That starting nation only affects which set of missions you initially have access to for the core game. Every other expansion can be done regardless of nationality, and you can change nationality when you don't have a core game mission active.

The tutorial NPCs are because it WASN'T common sense. You needed a guide book or a wiki to figure out most of the quests, or you had to ask someone who had those resources. A lot of old quests and missions are obtuse, and they have you hunting for ??? points where maybe they tell you the zone, but there can be 10+ of those ??? points in the zone and you don't know which is for which. Unless you are working two monitors and keeping the wiki up, there's no way you'd figure out so much of the content nowadays, without hassling your linkshell for information that you could easily look up now. FFXI is an ultimate case of the "Guide Dang It" trope. We still have no idea how Absolute Virtue was intended to be defeated. There are hidden effects of items and recipes for crafting that we only know because they were in a Japanese Ultimania book that someone translated the content from.