Possible level/story jumps....really?

[Solarra]

Another thing we’re debating internally is whether or not to have something like World of Warcraft’s jumping potion that would work with both levels an story. I’m trying to decide if something like this should be timed with 4.0.

WoW would have players pay to jump over and skip levels and it’s something that can be considered for FFXIV as well...
...there has always been the debate of when we bring in new players, or if an existing player wants to bring in a new player, there’s disparity with the level gap between them, especially if the player has gone through all the content and their friend is just starting. It would be such an effort for the new player to catch up.

Ex WoW player here. The fact is, WoW's questing is a confusing mess that is face-roll easy but unsatisfying to play. Some of the side-quests are brilliant story-wise but the main story is jumbled and skips back and forth in time so much that it is practically impossible for a new player to follow, add in Heirloom gear which was not available to new players but gave older players a huge advantage and it's easy to see why so many new players didn't stick around and why people didn't want to level conventionally.

FF does things so much better imo. The story makes sense. Synching means you can play with your friends and help them out while they are levelling. The gear from Hall of the Novice helps put new players on par with those of us who are synched and the tutorials help them learn the basics of their role. Levelling is fairly fast up to HW and you have several routes you can take to do it.

I didn't like the levelling potion in WoW, I used it, dumped the character shortly afterwards and went back to levelling an alt.
Personally, I'd much rather they trimmed some of the padding from the MSQ and gave more xp from HW quests (and around lvl 48ish where I seem to remember having to grind fates to level up).
It won't please everyone, but often the people who want to hop straight to max level don't stick around as was shown by WoD. The WoW devs even stated that their market was cyclical (in other words they expected to lose a large amount of players fairly shortly after their expansion released), though I'm not sure they expected as many of their long-term subscribers to move on as well.

When you go too far with streamlining a game becomes very easy but ultimately unsatisfying to play for any length of time.
While looking at WoW, it might be an idea to consider that while WoD was floundering, Nostralius (unofficial Vanilla WoW server) was proving so successful Blizzard decided to take legal action to shut it down.