New Player: Critical Observations

[Jinko]

Levelling

I don't want to see roadblocks to levelling like genkia, they were fun in 11 but if you couldn't get a group it was just a hindrance.

I agree that levelling is too fast and that low to mid content seems a bit wasted due to this, that being said I am a fan of gear grind at end game (only if gear is worth getting, which currently it isn't), and Yoshida has said that he is happy with designing a game where players get to end game fast.

Lets not forget that 50 is not end game and he has made some hints to a possible cap increase after 1.21.

Battle

Agree with you the standard monsters and leves are too easy, but this content is meant for solo play.

Going to a stronghold camp for example is much harder and lvl 45-50 content (mainly Primals) has its challenge as well.

I don't agree to enforcing party play either, some people just don't have the time to find a party, it was one of the worst aspects of FF11, because if you only had 1-2 hours to play you didn't want to waste someone else's time and if you made a group you felt as if you were forced to play for 5-6 hours or more.

Levelling in a group is much faster than soloing so there are incentives.

You suggest making leves main solo content (they already are) but there is no easy way to make leve mobs easier than standard mobs (or vice versa) as monsters work on base stats x lvl, it would require leve monsters being much lower level which would effect the XP you get, in turn making the content worthless, they could make leve mobs have different stats to regular mobs but this would require more work for the dev team.

Leves are already slower XP than partying, although perhaps not at low levels.

Gathering

As someone else suggested in the last patch certain items were scaled back to only provide 1 item per attempt, in turn reducing the overall supply of materials. (I imagine this is work in progress and will continue to be monitored)

Gil is still too easy to come by but the dev team are working on this with gil sinks and such, as above I expect they are still working out ways to solve the issue.

Conclusion

Your post is a good one although comes across wanting the game to follow too strongly in FFXI foosteps, I can appreciate the want to have things feel familiar I also played FFXI for 5 years but after a while you will learn to except that the game is what it is.

I thinks its really important that dev team don't try to make this game too much like 11 as it should stand on its own and Yoshida does seem to be doing a good job of changing the game for the better.