How am I meant to level with a friend now?

[Dubont]

you mean 9 months ago? Well, it sucked even more than what we have now.

but it had more players and every server was literally full. Almost everyone was put into a queue for logging in. Figaro, on release day, had around 3k players at my time of login. This isn't counting how many were still in queue, or waiting on the Standard edition. Also, to use your argument against you, FFXi sucks more now than it did 3 years ago. =)