Quote Originally Posted by elemental10 View Post
The place to get the new classes will be in the expansion's area, which is only available after completing the main quests up until a point and that means getting a level 50.

So, yeah. You need at least 1 level 50 to get access to the new classes. I would see that it would encourage people to level and explore the classes, new areas. More things to look forward to once you get your main to 50.
I suspect that this may be true if a player doesn't roll a new Au Ra character and selecting the new class to start. Who knows, maybe the Au Ra have a new starting area entirely (would't be the first game to do it.)

FFXI AFAIK never added any new races to play, so that's a current unknown as to how SE will handle it. WoW can't be used as a reference point either because the game has a clear (PvP) race divide, where as FFXIV does not. The only game I've played that "added races" added new starting areas for that "home" area, which were not PvP neutral, but also gave human players the option of starting/rebirthing characters to the new area, allowing them to skip the main storyline and play the new content that wasn't dependant on the old storyline. However to be fair, the storyline had a lot of rough edges, so it was completely possible to play the race-centric storyline before they retconned it in a nerf'ing patch 2 years later.

So what I expect really from SE is that the players will get the option of "starting" the main scenario, or starting via an alternate scenario (and picking back up with the Grand Company storyline around level 15) by having the new area as a starting point as well if they pick Au Ra or pick any of the new classes/jobs at creation.