Quote Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda View Post
There were a few things in FFXI that helped it achieve that.

Many areas had fairly wide spread of enemy level ranges and often also had NMs and HNMs that were much higher level than the highest level normal enemies.
This is probably an unpopular opinion but I think levels tend to be the problem. All they do is separate people artificially. You could be the best FF14 player in the world, but you wouldn't be able to do anything past your level no matter what just because it's either prohibited or impossible stat wise. If MMO's didn't forcibly separate people by level and were designed around cooperation, there would probably be a lot more incentive to party up. Though even if there is any merit to that idea, I don't see how you'd implement it in an existing game like FF14. At the very least we could stop locking new expansions off by level and maybe give new players some reason to venture beyond ARR, but FF14 suffers from a very inflexible story, not to mention the massive difference in stats between early and late game. Perhaps there would need to be a separate zone with its own leveling.