Returning Follow

If you expect the community to be different/better, you're probably going to find yourself disappointed. Unlike XIV, XI lacks tools to get people to easily come together for specified activities. Incentives for people to backtrack and help others are also minimal or outright non-existent. It is likely you'll be alone in your leveling and the majority of questing with a lot of missions done at at 99, even.

Ultimately, my best advice would be to find a decent linkshell that'll take you in from the start, but even that might be hard to do just via forums like this. If you can't manage that, I fear your time will suffer worse than it would in XIV. And don't be fooled, there are treadmills in XI, too. Some far worse than anything XIV has at the moment. Lookin' at you, RMEs.

TRAITOR!!!

lol, j/k, while the tools to backtrack and whatnot truly are limited and/or nonexistant, as was stated by Seriha, I put to test the notion that one can level to cap within a 24 hour period. While it somewhat pains me to say this, it's true, you CAN do it, and I DID do it.

The benefits that I saw were that old content isn't level capped anymore, which is nice if you want to re-experience the game's older content. The current game is HEAVILY endgame-oriented. I'd dare to say that endgame is the current meta-leveling, as iLvl plays a huge role in what content you can and can't do. If you ever met endgame in XIV you'll see the similarities. So the game isn't without progression, it simply isn't based on level progression anymore like it use to be.

And that's not entirely bad. It's interesting to see how 'leveling' is irrelevant past the initial level cap. Mechanically I can see why it's impossible to do away with levels entirely, and I do look forward to seeing how they gate content in the future based on iLvl's.