ff11 has a smaller team and which grants them more room to breathe and allows them to be more frequent with updates since it has less hands to go through.
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FFXI somehow still makes enough to bring in a profit and content is probably rather easy to make as most patches are usually just a few minor adjustments, they also did plan a new story arc for the 20th anniversary which is this year. I went to try it as it was on sale for the 20th anniversary and I do see the appeal, but you have to like really grindy stuff and maybe have a friend to help guide you that has played before.
For all the reasons you said... the company won't just end the game or the release of new content over an arbitrary thing such as passing level 100 in the future. It is just a number. The same way that item level is just a number. Does it really matter? They'll do another stat squish so we won't have 100,000 critical hit or 1,000,000 HP. That's about all they need to do.
As for FFXI, I think raising the level cap was a mistake. I also think that keeping that cap at 75 for so long was a mistake. Seems like a contradiction. However, keep in mind the history of the game.
- First level cap was 50.
- Major patches upped it to 70 over the course of a year or so
- Rise of the Zilart came out and raised it 75
- Then it stayed at 75 for seven years
That's the problem. They raised it incrementally... then bam... plateaued for 7 years. Then they opened the flood gates to 100. There was an entire generation of players (7 years worth - longer than many players even stick with a single MMO) that spent countless hours min/maxing all their gear for level 75 characters. Then, in one fell non-expansion swoop (Abyssea, which were more like DLC mini-content releases), they blew all that away. I was gone before the cap went up. Not because I was done with being stuck at 75. But because I was trying out some other game (FFXIV 1.0).
As for FFXIV, they won't let some arbitrary number stop them. If they think it is a big deal, they'll milk two more expansions by only raising the level cap by 5 each time and doubling the effort for reach level.
I prefer just a completely different type of progression eventually that doesn't include character levels; because the whole level squish thing feels lazy to me. Numbers squish i get, that does have to happen, it's happened already when we got Endwalker- i just don't want past content to become possibly trivialized even more then it already is.
Blizzard and World of Warcraft went down a certain route to combat numbers/level bloat, i feel like this dev team can do better, i feel like they should be able to do better.
There's games with a level cap of 9,999,999 ... course, who KNOWS how this code scramble is coded.