Quote Originally Posted by PyurBlue View Post
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.
Depends on how the enemy levels are used. When an area has a wide range of levels it enables looping progression that essentially has players return to areas multiple times at different stages of the game. Enemy stat growth per level in FFXI was probably it's largest incentive to party up for content at higher levels, Having looping progression to get higher level players routinely returning to even early game areas made it easier for lower level players to get help if needed. You could argue that FFXIV's social aspects have suffered immensely due to how easy an overwhelming majority of the game is paired with it's extremely linear design.