Game is in a desperate need of challenge.

[Anty]

Everyone is always afraid of consequences of what content may bring is sad because it limits variety. There's still plenty of jerkassery and e-peen waving currently no matter how much you try to dumb the game down.

if people have to actually work together on different goals to achieve something they get a better feeling for the community - only DF- Parties etc. will never be able to give that feeling to anyone.
Due to the fact that all content is fast learnable and the only real challenge is "lag"... ppl get it done fast, and they only know "fast". They completely lose patience. Don't help eachother etc. etc.
They rather wait 5 hrs to get their "perfect" setup (by setting i lvl to almost 90 for content that can be done with ilvl65) - which might also fail - then get someone slightly new and teach them (which in the long run is better for everyone, since more ppl know how to accomplish certain goals).

I think overall harder content and more real group orientation is a better countermeasure to "jerkassery and e-peen waving", since the people then don't forget that it used to be a challenge for them back in the days.
The fact that we get higher dungeons/primals with like every pach/2nd patch makes it extremely casual unfriendly. Since nobody wants to do the older content anymore since its "old" and gear there just sux.

People will get left behind much faster that way. I never felt in a rush in ffxi, i always had goals even at times when i played that game like crazy.
And i was FAR away from many endgamers, yet i had many friends who did endgame, and had slightly better gear, yet you still did so many things with them. There was so much other stuff to do.
Things to try, options to try out, etc. And it was far more rewarding to help people then to get gear.
People in general were less selfish since they remembered how it was.

Nobody here remembers how hard things were, since you tried them 3-10 times max. and got it done.