A few comments to this Topic

1) They need to copy FFXI's difficulty level, they need to make it casual in terms of time commitments to do events, but the last thing this game need to be is a game catered to those who suck at gaming.

2) I think copying the battle system would be a bad idea in general... 99% of the mmo gamers now days are ADHD or very close to it so the battle speed alone would make people quit.

3) FFXI was not a nitch mmo it was pretty mainstream it was the standard hardcore oldschool mmo in the style of EQ, it was one of the largest mmos in the world preWoW, only after WoW did it get the Niche Title. WoW brought alot of ppl who hate mmos into the mmo genre, which is why the divide is here on this forum between oldschool and WoW era mmoers.

4) PW never took more then 2hrs to kill, it is just people kept trying to kill it by throwing bodys at it which until abysea simply did not work, you needed gear and a solid strategy to stand a chance.

SE removed several forms from it and put a 2hr cap on it (so there was no recent 18hr attempt the cap was added year ago) and people where beating it in about 90-100mins after a strategy was worked out. Was similar to how Kirin and tiamat use to take 4-5hrs a spawn when it first came out, right before abysea people where killing them in 2 to 40mins. Aka the boss fights were not a horrible design decision it was stupid players for not calling it quits when they could not kill it in a few hours.

SE designed them to be unkillable unless players made/figured out a strategy to kill them, and this is what all mmo should do. maby not to that extreme but they need to have that challenge to them, this whole push to making sure all player feel successful all the time is just horrible game design both mmo and console.