There is no way they would revert the game back to 2008, they had to make new content for people who still pay for the game, the game basically has gone through 3 eras now post 75 cap. Abyssea era (99 cap), Voidwatch/Neo salvage+nyzul Era (99+ era sidegrades to abyssea gear but generally better.), and now the Seekers (ivl 119 era).
I don't get why people think they should make 0 new content if they did that the game would die for sure. Because people want stuff to do in the game they pay for.
You would like FFXI now basically they going back and redoing all the old content for the level 99 cap. Reusing all the old fights, IE all the bcnm, all the ark angel fights, a lot of the old mission fights. Only thing is now they drop ilvl 109 or 119 gear, the number of items you need to upgrade your gear depends on if you did limbus or not and +1 your old gear if you did limbus or go back and do it now then you need to farm less papers from the bcnm. Access to fights is pretty grindy everyone in your party needs 20 merits to enter and there is 5 selectable difficulty levels for everything. You can play as much as you want but gearing out all your jobs takes quite a long time due to the fact you have to keep getting 20 merits everytime you want to do a fight.
If anything there is too many people because of the 3 instance per server limitation. There is still like 1300 people per server whenever I log on the game. If more then 3 groups are trying to do a bc fight be prepared to spam the bc to see who gets in first for over an hour. While some things are still a ??? and theres only 1 spawn if some guy is taking 30 min to try and solo whatever you be waiting, behemoth is pretty horrible for this because defending ring is still good.
For whatever reason for the last couple of patches the new expansion zones kind of been on pause as they went through and redid the rest of the old game for lv99+, they still in the process, they letting up upgrade dyansmis gear next, and abyssea gear last but that hasn't been announced. But the thing is everything takes 20 merits to get into the fight now which is too much for your average player.
Only thing that would be a deterrent to old players coming back is new gear is pretty expensive to upgrade. It costs about 80m to get your relic weapon up to ilvl 119 the current item level cap. Your AF 119 af gear will cost you about 5m per piece once you get the required drops from the BCNM and Ark Angel fights. There is an expensive 5m crafted item that is needed for all your 119 AF that takes a 106-110 crafter to make, could be cheaper if you have the craft or know someone but you can only have 1 craft in 11. Looking at about 25m in crafted mats per job to go along once you got your papers.
