Game Has Gone to the Dogs

[Magis]

Oh, this worn out idea.

FFXIV is a throw-back to the group-or-die games that have largely disappeared from the face of the planet (thank God), where your ability to progress and even reach level cap is gated by the need to find others needing to do the same; FFXI abandoned this model for the better a long time ago now, Tanaka saw this and that was what he did in V1, sadly Yoshi decided to regress into the dark ages with V2 in this respect.

Grouping is fine, forced-grouping to unlock core content (banks, mounts, etc.) and simply to reach the level-cap is so last century. There are many ways to 'play with other players' that avoid hard gating.

Hint: the 'G' in MMORPG doesn't stand for GROUP!

FFXI abandoned that model and proceeded to lose many subscribers and unbalance the game to shit. Even the devs said they broke the game with Abyssea.