Quote Originally Posted by ZReport View Post
It's more ridiculous for you to believe that Yoshi-P will completely forgo the lore he has already set in place to make a few more people happy. You act as if there are tons of people who haven't at least beaten Ultima Weapon SM yet, which is no longer the case.
FFXIV is also extremely casual friendly and puts a heavy emphasis on helping those who are behind catch up. I would be very surprised if they expect brand new players to level 1 class/job all the way to 50 and play all the way through the main story line. And believe it or not there are brand new players (and I'm sure SE is hoping to attract some more with ninja).

Quote Originally Posted by ZReport View Post
Also, I'm not even here to advocate it being restricted to post 2.4 story, if you read my paragraphs correctly you would have seen that my guess is post 2.2. I don't even think that Ninja and Rogue will even bet part of the Main Scenario at all at this point afterwards, only that that specific 2.2 quest being a prerequisite to unlocking them. This isn't anything new to MMOs -- in WoW you have to be 55 just to play Death Knight, in FFXI you need to be 30 to access any of the advanced jobs. Personally, I could care less if it was story locked or not, I just know how FFXIV (and FFXI before it) works.

FFXIV is heavily lore-based, if you think for a minute that the team will deviate or mess with it in any way, you're greatly mistaken.
Death Knight is a bad example. Sure you had to be 55 to unlock Death Knight, but Death Knight itself started at lvl 55. So you level to 55, create a new character and pick up where you left off and continue to the max level of 70 at the time. So unless you're saying that we should start rouge/nin at 50 after unlocking it (horrible idea), this is a terrible comparison

FFXI is a bad comparison, it's a dated MMO structure with more hardcore and rigid requirements for things. FFXIV is intended to be much more casual and they do much to move away from this sort of thing.

For a game that just handed out i110 gear to hunt participants in order to catch them up with equivalent hard core content that was released 3 months ago, it would be baffling that they choose to require brand new players to attain maximum level in one class just to play another completely separate class.