Quote Originally Posted by Gokulo View Post
No, but saying that people thing about it positively is. Anyone that had to go through dunes more times to level sub-jobs or w/e dreaded going back there. The experience was fun the first 2-3 times, but after that... ugh D:
I treally depends on the context you look at it. It was a necessary evil in my opinion, much like alot of things that people hate and want streamlined. People don't often realise that just because something was not their favorite part of the game that it played a significant role in how their entire gameplay experience evolved.

Take a look at leveling in general in XI it was slow, extremly slow to that point. It gave people a large window to interact with others, and learn their jobs (yes people did learn how their job worked in parties), and expand their character before actually reaching the "endgame".

Once you finished leveling your first job you had a whole new world open up to you in terms of activities. As for games with quick (Pointless) leveling curves, the whole point of it is to get you to the endgame it's far too fast to learn anything, you will avoid people you don't know like the plague, and your character ends up with a very linear view of their job and the game.

You are now at the endgame, the only point of the game.

Some things like traversing the world taking time, not knowing if monsters are agressive or not, quests not being highlighted for you and guided by the nose to completion, having a longer leveling curve.

Can all exponentially change how the game evolves, FFXI went several years before raising the level cap from 75 because they had alot of breathing room as to how they added features and allowed them to take a long time to finish. MMO's that follow the "Standard" WoW path tend to have content that dates itself quickly causing power-creep to be a massiv issue.

Obviously this is all just IMHO, but I always found some of the more annoying things in XI that people complain about to be some of the best features the game offered to make sure we weren't standing around in town with nothing to do.