Level sync didnt patch a hole, it made the first one, since leveling was to hard for the casual, level sync worked in the short-term, in the long-term it made entire servers lvl75 excluding a few or anyone who would have ever wanted to start play and could do nothing to level, level sync was created because of people who endlessly complain about everything being to hard because they lack time.

"Surplus also is a problem because it's a stop sign that tells you how long you can have fun before it becomes useless non-progressive mediocrity"

Surplus is nothing, when you start the game, you get something like a 400% bonus to SP and it slowly lowers over time til you hit rank 25, thats a "bonus" that you are slowly weened off of. Its a gift that SE should have never given, give an inch and you want a mile.

And surplus itself resets every week completely or you just play a different job or be offline and it slowly goes down, especially casuals play-time as you all discribe as maby 4hrs on the weekends, you should barely be hitting it.

Something awesome though from this sub-topic comming up, they could add back in would be exp (SP chains) like in 11. At the moment getting to 50 is fine, but when it gets to 75-99 it would be hell on earth.