I might get hate or banned but hey w/e

[Claymore65]

Will people stop saying this? 1.0 did not fail cause it was XI-2, it failed cause it was a unfinished game that ran horrible.

That's not actually true. There was plenty besides the glitches and performance issues that was heavily criticized about 1.0. Everything from the heavy emphasis on Levequests, the EXP limits (and levequest limits), the extremely poorly designed UI, the slower combat, the lack of direction, and more was heavily criticized about the game on release. Just looking at some of the older reviews of 1.0 (it had a 49 on metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fi...asy-xiv-online ) complain about far more than simply the performance issues/bugs...although there are certainly many complaints about that. Much of the both player and critics disliked the heavy amount of grinding, focusing on killing random mobs and levequests over dungeons and the like. While some of that was improved with patches, it was still never going to be a great success. They had already lost faith in the gaming community. A Realm Reborn being significantly more successful is due to more than just it being "more performance friendly and less buggy". From a game design perspective, it was appealing to far more players.

Back on topic, I can certainly understand the idea. FFXI DID do a much better job at forming a community. The gameplay from a fundamental level required players to group up, and that forced players to make relationship quickly. It also proved significantly less convenient for many to play. If you couldn't get a group up quickly, that might be all you spent your night on. It was a blessing and a curse. Considering my busy work schedule, FFXIV is considerably more convenient. I also much prefer grinding dungeons to random monsters out in the field, but your mileage may vary on that one.

That said, there are certainly improvements that could made to FFXIV to make being social easier. Perhaps more "global" linkshells could be established for each server. For example, there might be a large, server wide crafting linkshell that is accessible through the UI. If every player had access to it, it would be easier to find people to chat with. With a good number of those, chatting with others might be easier. Once again though, designing "social" content can be exceedingly difficult. It's tough to know what will work for people.