Quote Originally Posted by Yurimi View Post
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You have to recall a few things about FFXI. The first being the sheer grind to get to 75. It took a very very long time to get there, but it wasn't particularly difficult. Also, we as NA players started when the first expansion was already out. This allowed for a lot of time to build between RoZ and CoP. Most NA players were just getting or not quite 75 yet by the time that expansion was released. Also, the cap used to be 50 at launch. The reason that game retained a high player base was because NA players were always slightly behind content-wise, and Japanese players didn't care about maximization as much, but exploration so they were always entertained by the world. We started 2.0 at essentially the same time as the rest of the world, and yes, it is much faster, but content-wise, it is almost equivalent to vanilla FFXI.

I'd seriously recommend dropping the game and picking it up after an expansion or two if you are specifically looking for the FFXI experience, which I totally understand. This game will thrive because it has made SE so much money, but a dev team has a schedule already made. Once the fiscal quarter changes, we may be able to see a difference in the dev cycle, but until then we just have to be patient. This goes for anyone.