The expansion on the horizon

[Kesey]

I'm hoping for the new leveling system, they look towards what they introduced in Eureka and Bozja. Essentially levels that aren't levels, but DO effect how much damage you take and do to the enemies (at least in the case of Eureka). Basically make ilvl the actual indicator of power.

Knowing that they've cut stats before, I think the logical answer is cut levels in half and have everyone log in to 8.0 at level 50 then level up to 60. That would give them 4 more expansions back to 100 (fitting the 10 year road map). I think an objective look at some jobs could argue for a better spread of skills across levels and a crunch would give them the chance to do that. Plus the new player experience wouldn't need altered at all, as catching up will be rather quick and let them level alt jobs too.

The idea of adding another system on top of what we have sounds cool, but the best thing for the health of the game would be the crunch.

[Lyth]

A level crunch is one option, and as you say, it forces them to re-evaluate the acquisition level of actions, which is important for the new player levelling experience. But there's also the issue of the increasing amount of story content and time that it takes to get current. That can be quite daunting for a completely new player. Often times longer running story franchises need to be designed with multiple 'jump in' points so that you can encourage new fans to get interested without feeling like they have to commit a lot of time to get up to date.

There's another way that you could do it. Let's say that Level 100 is designated with a star, similar to Chrono Trigger's symbol for max level, and from 8.0 onward you start up a new series of 1-100 with that star symbol attached. When you release 8.0, start out new players at 7.0 in the beginning of the new adventure, and revise the experience gains such that you can get from 1-100 in the span of a single expansion, getting you to the new level 1* with a full set of actions by the time you're at 8.0. Allow those new players to go back and revisit expansions that they haven't yet experienced from ARR to Endwalker in a modular fashion by speaking with an NPC in their own time. It cuts out the slower pacing of jobs in ARR where you have a barebones action set and gets players into the action faster. You could probably even go back and lift the syncing system and just standardize all the old content to level 100 at that point.

[Cleretic]

I think an actual level crunch only makes sense in a game that either replaces its leveling content, or just doesn't put much value onto it in the first place. WoW can do a level crunch no problem because it redefines what that leveling experience entails, meaning that there's never really a point where you can say 'okay this point pre-crunch is exactly comparable to this point post-crunch'. Meanwhile, say, Warframe... well, wouldn't exactly have reason to do a level crunch anyway, but if it did nobody would really care because nothing is actually moving, you're still fighting the same enemies with the same general tools and very little surrounding story.

I don't think FFXIV would do a level crunch, because to do so would be to implicitly devalue the part of the game you did that to. XIV values all of itself, and that includes the things that happen in the leveling experience, so the devs just wouldn't do something that made Heavensward feel like less compared to what comes after. It also begs comparison with itself by doing so; people are literally going to be able to compare the same points pre-crunch and post-crunch, and frankly, I don't think the post-crunch experience is going to look great, because any given part of the game is going to have us fighting the same things but with less tools. That'd especially do damage to still-popular challenges in the game that are locked to non-cap levels; the deep dungeons, Eureka, Bozja, the Ultimates. Already, a few jobs kinda chafe at those requirements because not every job is designed to be fully capable at level 60 or 70; I hear Black Mage really struggles in the Bahamut and Ultima Ultimates for that reason. A level crunch may well break those things in a way that they can't recover from; beating the Dendainsonne solo at level 60 is already really hard, how do you expect people to handle that at level 30?

To put it cynically: A level crunch is an option that doesn't respect the content that came before it, sacrificing it in favor of what's to come. So it works best in games that already doesn't respect that content.

[Iscah]

A level crunch would achieve nothing of use, because the amount of EXP you get is synched up to story progression. If they cut levels in half, you'd need to level up half as fast to keep pace with the story quests, and all the levels you learn spells at would get halved as well. If ARR's ending level was revised to 25, your level 50 spell would now also be learnt at 25 to keep it at the same "end of ARR" stage and nothing would change, except we'd have to re-memorise all the numbers and a lot of older conversations about the game would be rendered confusing.

My preferred solution to the increasing level range is simply increasing the armoury bonus so people can level their first job at MSQ pace(ish) and then go faster with their additional jobs – at least for getting up through the earliest levels when you've got very few dungeons available.

[SannaR]

snips

I have played them. Did tactics up til a little ways into chapter 4. Got to Ultimecia's Castle until hitting a wall due to how I built my group and being very bad at Triple Triad. Played XII until a, at least to me, big level spike happened and I was having trouble following the story. That was also back when you couldn't open certain chests yet. I also played XI until Rhapsodies of Vana'diel wrapped up and 2.0 was coming out.

Corsair didn't just stand around and look pretty while they kept track of the different rolls they placed on which groups. You built up tp either to be able to unleash a skill chain or if you were fighting a boss that had weaknesses. As the only other person outside of a Ranger that could use all of the Marksmanship weapon skills. Since the Hexagun was your secondary weapon. The only reason it had a B and not something higher in skill was to let Ranger not feel completely useless. You would use said weapon skills to try and find those weaknesses. As hitting those would tie into not only doing more damage. But when those bosses were fist being introduced it was thought by the playerbase those weaknesses also contributed to helping with Treasure Hunter. Ugh now all I can think of is how perverse the devs were back then. You'd think Tanaka and those that left to make XIV wouldn't want a frustrated playerbase when it came to trying to figure out if their hunches and maths was correct or not for things like skill caps and system skills.

You also wouldn't need to have a 1-90 skill set as I feel if they put it into the game when it would have made sense to do so would have when they introduced Machinist. As I'm not sure what job it would have fed into or morphed into prior to that as it would have been a class. Maybe transform into Marksman or even Buccaneer. Could have skills work the same way that they do now upgrading into others. Heck if we didn't get Machinist they could have introduced Lorens a whole lot sooner. As he was mentioned just not named back then too. It's like I said the devs at some point chose to drag it out to the backyard and bury it in hopes no one noticed the freshly dug hole. Probably around the time they chose to no longer make classes.

[Alleluia]

This upcoming expansion seems like the perfect time to introduce a secondary starter experience. The first grand arc of FF14 is over and, while it will play into this second one I'm sure, I really can't see them continuing to require new people to go through the storyline of 5 expansions to get current.

And I think there's signs that they won't be. We have the Neverending Codex, which is currently only particularly useful for people who cutscene or story skipped. I mean, yeah, its nice to explicitly see how the devs want to frame the events I remember, but am I really the target audience for a recap of Alphinaud's character arc through Heavensward? Or is the person who missed it the target? I'd say it must be the person who missed it. Right now, that's just people who skip cutscenes or bought story boosts, the latter of which is not the majority of players cus extra money. Also, they might not care about the codex anyway, cus story skipping.

I think the real target audience for the codex hasn't manifested yet: new 7.0 players. I am willing to bet that you will be able to start from level 1 (in current or only new jobs, idk) in 7.0 and have the option to begin the game in story arc 2 and level through that. And the codex (all entries in it as of 6.5) is gonna be unlocked for you immediately so that, when you come across characters, you can look them up if you care enough.

And, per what Cleretic and Ryu are saying:

If it helps what people are speculating on, Yoshi-P did confirm early this year that 7.0 will end at level 100; there was an idea of ending it at 99, but apparently decided not to.

For what happens after that, they don't seem 100% sure yet; Yoshi-P thinks continuing to just add more and more levels sounds a bit half-assed (I'm not sure I agree, I'm a proponent of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it', but I get it), but it also didn't sound like they had a better idea yet. ...which, incidentally, means that there's not exactly existing clues as to what they're going to do for us to speculate on, lore or not.

I'm hoping for the new leveling system, they look towards what they introduced in Eureka and Bozja. Essentially levels that aren't levels, but DO effect how much damage you take and do to the enemies (at least in the case of Eureka). Basically make ilvl the actual indicator of power.

I think we're gonna end up with some kind of a level masking system for older players in these new zones that will attempt to put us all on equal footing. Either that or they just sync us down depending on what level new msq quest we are on when in those zones or something. Everyone hates having their kit taken away, though, so I think the easier thing might be level-syncing our ilvl down, keeping the kit, and then just allowing new players to start with only new jobs in the new expac. Kind of like how I understand Death Knight worked in WoW? Minus the requirement to already have a max level class to unlock it.

[RyuDragnier]

This upcoming expansion seems like the perfect time to introduce a secondary starter experience. The first grand arc of FF14 is over and, while it will play into this second one I'm sure, I really can't see them continuing to require new people to go through the storyline of 5 expansions to get current.

I don't think it'll be this expansion due to hitting level 100, not to mention it being confirmed that Krile and Thancred will be with us for this next one. But I do think it'll happen for 8.0, as if we DO go to the New World, it'd be the perfect place to start from scratch in leveling, locales, characters...overall a full clean slate in a brand new continent that would be perfect for new players to walk into.

[Lyth]

...

It's fairly difficult to view things from the point of view of a prospective player, when you've spent hundreds or even thousands of days across 10+ years in said game. It's unrealistic to expect their experience of the game to be the same as yours, as you have had completely different timescales to acclimatize yourself to the layers upon layers of MMO game systems. To you, an expansion means 10 levels (310 levels across 31 classes/jobs if you're a completionist.) To a player starting even next expansion, that's 10x the amount just to get caught up. And the climb gets progressively more intimidating with every expansion, regardless of how you scale the XP systems. The main reason why modern MMOs do level squishes (unlike older MUDs, where players could gain 1000s of levels endlessly) is psychological. You reduce that inflated number down to a manageable amount, so that it doesn't deter people from investing time into the game (which is always the priority with decisions like these).

Longstanding players, naturally, feel like such changes disregards their own personal history with the game. On some level there's the expectation that prospective players should go through what they did, back in the day, in order to get to the same point in time, or else you've 'devalued' their experience. Which is precisely the sentiment developers have to ignore, or else you actively deter new growth. That's why what I'm offering is a compromise. You can keep those levels that you've earned, but just change the annotation for it. If level 101 starts at 1*, then level 10* is still level 110. So if the catch-up process that takes you in to the start of 8.0 gets you through those first 100 levels at an accelerated rate, then everyone can start the new system from 8.0 onwards feeling like there is a reasonable number of levels to get caught up on.

You've also hit the nail on the current problem around syncing. New expansions don't change our total action budget. So as we add on more expansions, the available set of actions in synced older content progressively decreases over time, such that the syncing system feels considerably worse now than it did in Heavensward. That's one reason why the developers have opted towards 'upgrading' actions rather than replacing them (so you don't end up performing a two combo rotation in an older Ultimate). But a level systems rework provides the opportunity to standardize a lot of old content. Part of the difficulty in preserving the original challenge comes from the fact that you're experiencing these fights from a range of different level ranges. But what if the new standard for all pre-8.0 content was level 100? You'd have a way to roughly restore some of those fights to something closer to their original experiences.

And then we come to the story. Like I pointed out earlier, long running story franchises deliberately have multiple points that you can climb aboard. If someone wanted to know the best way to get into watching Gundam, a purist might argue that you should go in release order starting from the first UC series. Because the expectation is that you have to go through what they did, in order to 'earn' your place in the fandom. But that's exactly the sort of thing that scares off new viewers. The pragmatic solution is that you introduce an exciting new series that requires no prior knowledge, and throw in a bunch of homages and references to the older ones. So that way, once they're hooked, they can go back and check out your older stuff. In the same way, you might expect every new player go through the story starting from ARR and working their way to present in order to 'respect' that content. But the game's growth will eventually stagnate if you do.

7.0 is a very good starting point, given that it marks a new story arc. The idea being, if you drop new players off at the start of 7.0, they no longer have to go through hundreds of hours worth of cutscenes to get caught up. Let's say you jump aboard a chocobo carriage, but this time it takes you to Southern Ilsabard, starting your accelerated levelling up to level 1* (101) when you hit 8.0. If you want to go back and learn about the history of the Scions, perhaps you talk to someone and you get links back to ARR, which let you unlock the older cutscenes and content at your leisure. It's still all there, available for you to work through at your own pace. But now you have the option of going back to it once you're 'caught up' and ready. Try out the new content, see if you enjoy it and it gets you excited, and then use your downtime to explore all the earlier stuff. It also means that you're less likely to see people level skip past the old story and regret not having played through it later.

[kaynide]

I'm hoping for the new leveling system, they look towards what they introduced in Eureka and Bozja. Essentially levels that aren't levels, but DO effect how much damage you take and do to the enemies (at least in the case of Eureka). Basically make ilvl the actual indicator of power.

I'm not sure it's the most elegant solution, but assuming they do expansions as semi-self contained stories here on out, they could have expansion-specific iLVL and/or levels.

Little convoluted, but:
In 7.0 you are Level 100, End of expansion. Have expansion set up to future expacs will be self contained and playable out of order.

In 8.0, you are level 100, but also get to level 10 "insert-rank-name-here", with top iLVL items requiring this level 10 rank. I'd say you only need do this once for all jobs to get access, or maybe once per role.

Then as 9.0 comes out, you are still level 100, but can now get to level 10 "insert NEW-rank-here" with it's own armor.

Point being, your Level 100+10 in 8.0 is the exact same power level as the 9.0 100+10, only your +10 only works in their respective expansion. Outside, any expansion-specific gear is desync'd to end-of-7.0 iLVL.

This also allows a future entry point where new players can skip to 100 and play the newest expansions with their friends, then go back and do the older "1 shot" expansions out of order.

Also, by the time 100 is a thing, asking new players to level every job to 100 is a pretty big ask :/ It's not hard, but it's not exactly fun when compared to other games/uses of time. I had everything to 80 at launch of 6.0 and I just kinda lost interest after I got about 1/2 to 90. And I've been slowly chipping away since 2.0 launch... I can't imagine the time sink for a newbie.

[Yuella]

Make ARR go to level 20. HW 30, SB 40, ShB 50, EW 60.