Needless to say at the point they decided to invoke the service fees i was finding it difficult to be motivated enough to log in. The world just felt empty to me. NPC's were generally non participants in the world and stood there like department store mannequins. the bad guys were either scary or not worth a second glance, without a party to help kill high level mobs solo grind was really painful. the massive amount of skills you had available with so many pointless ones didnt give any differentiation between classes. aside from people who want to be a completion and get every job up to 50 there was no real reason to do this. at least in my opinion.

That being said i have kept up on the forums and news feeds on the Lodestone and tracked changes being made and stuff in the pipes (so much stuff thats been said some is a little blurry so forgive me if some of the things i say are not entirely accurate.) I still have crysta left that i need to burn up and once i heard they are adding in Jobs i knew i was going to use some once that patch came out.

I must say that i am quite happy with the changes made since the billing was instated. I love how much better paced the battles are now with the combo system, except for the mage classes, would be nice to see some combo using a weapon skill in conjunction with a spell or something. There are quests everywhere from all kinds of NPC's on top of the Guild company quests and leve quests which helps a lot with trying to solo level (i'm big on soloing cause i am no currently in a linkshell.) I also love the inn and rested exp, another big help to casual players.

One thing that would be nice though is an ability to change your class/job and keep your equipment (like in ffxi) or have an "optimize" button to equip "optimal gear" for your current class/job. I'm happy to see more quests from NPC's but the more the merrier and ones with useful awards (gear, materia, etc.) but i'm sure all this will come in 2.0

Being a big Solo/Casual player I do hope they will have solo instanced dungeons or something special just for the solo player to balance out the required 4/2 players for the lowbie dungeon.

P.S. i will be back again if there is another substantial patch like this one with major changes, if not i will be back for sure at 2.0 if anyone has a LS that accepts casual players i would love to join.