Actually, if you combine them, you'd have about 5-6% of WoW's population.
Which spin-offs are you referring to?
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While this statement is true for the majority of those who loved ffxi and possibly other games, the fact is that the majority of gamers around the world would have to disagree with your statement for various reasons which have been discussed to death on these and every other gaming forum. In my opinion, if they lower the exp gained per hour, they should also lower the final planned cap. Just because this is final fantasy does not mean the cap has to be 99 (viii kind of killed that tradition anyways).
There are many benefits to lowering final planned cap & lowering exp gained/hour:
1) You don't have to change camps every 15 minutes
2) Having the freedom of a wider min/max level gap for experience parties compared to FFXI is pointless if you are changing camps every 15 minutes, especially if the highest lv member has a mountain of rested xp, and the lowest lv member has none
3) Gear lasts longer in relation to your level
4) Greater sense of accomplishment for attaining a level, ie: not cheapened
I'm sure there are more examples of why this would benefit the game but I'm in a rush, I just wanted to throw this out there. Either way, having this discussion on the forums at this point in time is probably just redundant. I would certainly hope that the dev team already has enough 'real' & individual content lined up to keep a newbie entertained for at least 80 hours of game play. Repetitive and senseless grinding is a relic of the past, a major indication that there are system/ funding limitations at play. Some aimless grinding is a good alternative, but to force consumers into this in this day and age will drive them away.
WoW is free to play now, and for a good reason. Irrelevant data is irrelevant.
You have many good ideas here but there was 1 area you forgot to mention. Grand Company quests. I do not know what SEs plans are for the Grand Companies vs Free Companies but currently this has been an untapped resource for a large amount of content. With this and the areas mentioned above the numbers and quality of quests could be varied and immense.
In most generic mmos in addition to quest chains you can queue up for dungeons relevant to your level to gain exp. People are forgetting that 2.0 will have content finder, queue up get a cross server group clear out a dungeon trash mobs and bosses get tons of exp.