An alternative idea to allowing parsing: The License Board

[Jaeifer]

Prologue

This is purely an idea and I am aware that it's extraordinarily unlikely that this will ever reach the dev team's ears but I have been contemplating about the matter for a while now and would just like to share how I would tackle the issue that I want to address, which reads as follows:

A lot of people, especially raiders, end up getting access gear from already having bought everything they could on their main class for esoterics or the newly introduced Alexander Savage Tokens. Leveling a class is pretty straight forward and doesn't require much knowledge of the job to get it done, even if it may take a while as a result of not harvesting the job's full potential. At the end of the day we sometimes meet people with really high level gear that play as if they've just reciently reached max level with the class and haven't even tinkered with their new abilities much, to the dismay of a few duty finder groups. A lot of people want, as a result of this, public global parsing so that we can get an idea of ourselves (and others) performances better and can find out if we have to improve and where we can improve. As FFXIV likes to build references to older titles I want to present a different take on the matter: The License-System from Final Fantasy XII.

How would it work?

Final Fantasy XIV needs some sort of practice grounds for jobs as I believe they're already a work in progress. What they could do, is add a sequence of trials (give it 10 for Levels 1-50, 5 advanced ones at Level 50, 5 from Level 50-60 and 5 advanced ones at Level 60 totalling 25 Trials).

Taking the example of THM/BLM they could start with something simple as "Use Transpose to switch between Astral Fire and Umbral Ice successfully 3 times" for the first trial to "Wager depending on the number of enemies whether or not to use Fire I or Fire II" for something early/intermediate to "Maintain Enochian for 3 minutes" as an advanced/final trial.
Completing a trial earns you the appropriate license and certain gear, next to a level requirement, requires an appropriate license level for the class to wield it. (Say i160 gear would require Black Mage License 20, Alexander Normal Gear Black Mage License 23 and Alexander Savage Gear Black Mage License 25).
It could even be taken to the pinnacle of being made a requirement to access certain higher level/expert duties instead of locking it behind the classic item level requirement.

This would mean that the player needs to obtain this degree of knowledge of any class before being able to equip higher level gear - which in return should hopefully increase the playerbase's skill level without the need for public parsing - and FFXII players might smirk at the reference.

Epilogue

What do you guys think of the idea? What would you ammend or do you have a completely different take on the subject? Feel free to contribute, even if it is just for fun's sake.

With regards,
Kanri