Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnought View Post
so ive been away from FFXI since abbyssea which i never even tried.
what is it that makes everyone in FFXIV hate Abbyssea?
i heard it made everything excessively easy, but in which way? i dont get it. is jeuno and whitegate really empty?
Port Jeuno started to fill up a ton after the first Abyssea expansion came out and saw a sharp decrease in Whitegate. Port Jeuno was initially the only place where you could use the Abyssea npc's to tele to certain areas, but it was since fixed to include the starting nations as well.

Abyssea allowed hardcore and casual gamers to get some great gear back when it came out. Soon after its launch, it was discovered that you could gain exp rapidly while amassing many time extensions. It got seemingly worse when Heroes of Abyssea was added, Dominion Ops could provide some serious bonus exp (5100exp per page was the highest I've seen, on top of exp from the mobs themselves). Abyssea only required a minimum level of 30 so players usually leeched their jobs from 30 to cap in a matter of hours or days.

Long story short, Maat's Cap isn't so far out of reach