New person with several questions

[nuyu11]

My full answer here

1. Is there a method to find which US server/data center will be more active at night. Since I work the long night shift I am more likely to be playing at the late hours.

Maybe other player will answer that.

2. What is the leveling curve like for inexperienced players? Would I expect to be level capped on one class (which I believe to be 50) within say 2-3 months?

Its fairly easy actually, for Tank & Healer spam Dungeon, for DPS do quest, Levequest and Hunt.

3. Does it work better to lvl cap one adventure class then work on another or simple work on the ones that are interesting at about the same rate. For example get my lancer up to 20 then pick up archer and work him up to 20 before moving back to lancer.

Up to you, some cross skill is useful and some cross skill is kinda must to have depend on your main Job

4. Is the crafting system good for self gear upgrades or is most things from main line quest going to be better?

Yes for me, later crafting is your Gil maker if you want to buy a house. I lvl my crafting using my leve because its fast and not bored especially gathering class.

5. How group dependent is the game for leveling up in the later end , say 30-50. In my experience even active servers have pug issues when it gets around the 2 to 3 am mark.

I strongly suggest go find a good FC and friends, later at lvl 50 there is 2 dungeons that you need to enter for main story progression and there is lot of cutscene there, if you DF/PUG there will be your worst experience if you follow the story because people will force you to skip the cutscene. So my advice is find some people who willing to wait for your long cutscene.

[Ehr]

Well looking at people's answers in here already I don't have anything I could really add to them. You're current trial character is on the same server as I am so I'll try to tell you some of the specific things about Ultros. As far as activity goes for the hours you play you may or may not have better luck with a European server though I don't recommend it if you are in North America since they're supposed to be moving the EU data center to Europe (or so I've heard) so you could end up with latency issues. I might be able to help you find an FC for you if you'd like that's more active at night, mine is made up of mostly people who are EDT so we might not be active when you're on (not quite sure what times you mean by late hours). As far as our economy goes, it varies and fluctuates. I wouldn't recommend buying HQ gear off MB, it's usually way more expensive than it should be in my opinion. As far as crafting gear goes, I myself am 3-star on every craftand I know some others with all crafts at 50 (some 3/4-star) who'd be willing to craft you something if you provide mats (including stuff that's sub-50). If there's anything I didn't mention that you wanna know about Ultros just ask. ^_^

[Risvertasashi]

Thanks for the prompt responses, two more questions

1. I noticed I was getting a crap load of gold/gill site spam for the hour or so I played, is this a constant problem and can you do more then just blacklist people who do this?

2. How is the player economy as I am still on the initial trial I am locked from the market board (what i presume to be the player market). Once I do get in to it will I find that I will need thousands and thousands of gill for basic purchases or millions for semi good items?

1. RMT spam is one of the bigger issues the community is dealing with right now. As others have said, /busy works as a stopgap but it comes with a lot of downsides. Another thing you can do is try to come to a very populated server like Balmung, which has far less spam by virtue of it being so hard to get a character on it.
Unfortunately there's not a whole lot you can do. You can also go into your chat settings and remove the chime from it, but, well... Yeah.

2. The best gear in the game at all levels are drops or (at endgame) earned from tokens from doing content. You don't really need gil at all. That said, a small amount does help to fill in the slots you don't get drops for... shouldn't be too difficult to afford whites, and a supportive FC may have crafters that will give you pieces for free.

Good luck out there.

[Niwashi]

1. I noticed I was getting a crap load of gold/gill site spam for the hour or so I played, is this a constant problem and can you do more then just blacklist people who do this?

Unfortunately, yes, this is a constant problem.

As you've found, you can blacklist them. This helps with the ones spamming the /shout channel in cities, as they tend to keep spamming their message over and over and over for quite a while. It's less useful for the ones sending /tell messages to you directly, as most of them tend to send a couple messages to everyone on the server and then switch to a different character so they can repeat the process. (The blacklist is, unfortunately, set to blacklisting the specific character and not all characters on their account, so switching characters is all they need to do to get around it.)

You can also report them to SE. Gil selling and the spam advertising it are against the ToS, and SE will eventually get around to banning their accounts. The reporting feature is really cumbersome, though, requiring you to fill out an entire form describing the issue rather than pulling all that info from the game itself, so most people don't bother.

You can use the command "/busy" to set your online status to a mode where nobody can send you tells, trade with you, invite you to a Party, FC, or Linkshell, or send you a Friend Invite. Obviously, that cuts you off from a lot of contact with other players, but it's an option for when the spam gets frustrating enough you'd rather isolate yourself than deal with it.

(As it currently stands, none of these are really good solutions, and a lot of us are getting pretty frustrated with SE's unwillingness to implement anything better. You can see that frustration in a number of threads over in the General Discussion forum.)

2. How is the player economy as I am still on the initial trial I am locked from the market board (what i presume to be the player market). Once I do get in to it will I find that I will need thousands and thousands of gill for basic purchases or millions for semi good items?

That's rather hard to answer, as the economy varies between different servers. From what I understand, the older more highly populated servers generally tend to have a lot more inflation than newer lower population servers, though I don't know whether that's true in every case.

How dependent you are on the economy also depends quite a bit on your playstyle. Nobody is selling anything you couldn't get or make for yourself if you're willing to put the time into it, so if you decide things are just way too expensive you can go the self-reliant route. You can get into crafting and make your gear rather than buying crafted gear, gather your own materials for it rather than buying them, spiritbond materia rather than buying it, and so on. Of course, not many people have the patience to (or interest in) doing that for everything. You'll need to find your own balance point between how much stuff to earn/make/farm on your own and how much stuff to just buy.

If prices on your server are inflated, and there are at least some categories of stuff you want to buy from the Market Board rather than get yourself, then you just need to find other things you can farm, gather or make to sell on the Market Board. An inflated economy on the stuff you want to buy is likely to be balanced by a similarly inflated economy on the stuff you sell, so you should be able to make the gil you need that way. (If prices on your server aren't overly inflated, this may not even be necessary, as the normal returns you get directly from quests/FATEs/dungeons, etc will cover a lot of expenses.)