You also get rewards when you complete the quests in this game and that serves a purpose.
The only purpose a quest is to share a story, no matter how small. After that the player is rewarded for learning this story. I play tons of rmp and I learned to look at everything. I do not do things for sake of a reward, and that is the problem now. People only do things for sake of reward and could careless about anything else. You kinda just proved that by over looking the stories I shared with even simple fetch quests from ffxi.
I have done pretty well every quest in existance in the cities and most of the village ones (heading to the silver bazaar now and then have to do limsa villages). The rewards are -useless- and -worthless-. I dropped almost all of them.
The -best- reward was like 30 crystals. I have 500-1000 of each crystal and ive been using a lot for crafting. 30 is not very impressive.
Other rewards have been:
Gear that is weak compared to other gear you can get for 3000gil
Bread....
orange juice
def and mag def potions that you can buy from npcs for 4000 each (i think you got 12 of them). They are pretty useless at rank 50.
So no, the rewards serve no purpose. Would be much faster to walk outside of grid, kill 10 marmots, npc the hides for 400gil each, and buy something better than the rewards you would get.
The in game Economy is a fairly large problem for me at least , the lack of Auction house and the fact that the few items i put for sale in the market ward dont sell , have led to me keeping items in storage intill an auction house update comes out , at the moment i have no idea the right prices i should be selling stuff at.
As for rest of game atm i really happy the direction that its starting to go but wont expand on that as i am cutting back on feedback atm.
Certain posters are just nasty and condescending, and if you don't agree with them, regardless of what "side" they might be on, that means you're not as intelligent or intellectual. I would advise just ignoring them and responding to the more tolerant and open minded posters. :)
it does if you can get 5 times as much reward as a rank 1 level 1 job in half the time it takes to finish a quest.
Right now there are approx 50 quests which require you to run around the entire world and take forever to do.
I could probably farm the equivilent of the rewards for 45 of them combined in under 2 hours with a brand new char just by farming marmots.
I don't want to sound like a jerk but have you actually done the quests? What rewards have you got that you consider good?
Best i found were crystals, 14000ish gil and a rank 40ish robe .
The area around Ishgard you're referring to is coerthas, it also isn't fully populated by rank 50 mobs, it has the same range as every other region, every region (excluding Mor Dhona) has 5 zones and the one closest to cities has lowest levels, think of aroudn Ishgard as 10-20 level mobs, even Glory zone has 10-20 mobs, you can rank quite nicely here 15+ if you want to waste time (as leves will get you there faster). Also comparing all regions to Thanalan is laughable.
In XI most quests were not pointless, and it all came down to 1 system: Fame, Fame like you do more quests and get more things, for example the Utsusmi scroll or Warp, sleepga2 etc spells. XIV has no fame system and has no point to questing as all quests provide useless rewards. Its just a base system they'll expand on later. And to be honest a lot of people dont care about NPC lore, they're not going to go to their friends and be like "man, last night I was on FFXIV and I spoke to this mithra who apparently had to defend herself from a beastmen tribe attack!", and his friend will be looking at him like wtfz? Its boring, read a book if you want lore. I wanna play games!
Gil is a waste, its useless, there is no economy imo lol I can make millions very easily just like the next guy and don't have a single thing to spend it on. But yes I agree on the gear thing. Even from the begining I joined an LS who was full of hardcore crafters, at the time I had no interest so all those shards+materials I gave away, what I got in return was full sets of armor for me and my buddys and we was fully pimped, and we still do that today but now we have just about everything we'll need until SE get off their lazy ass and implement a bunch of items.