In conclusion, I feel Square should do one or more of the following to be fair with the high level:
1) Compensate the lost xp: Square would compensate player for their extra xp. For example, for a lv 75, he should be compensated for 124k xp worth of merit points, because that's what he should have gotten under the new rule. For a player with 4 lv 75, he should get 4x124k = 500k xp worth of merit points. If you feel this is rediculous, then...
2) Depreciate the item/gil acquisition curve as they do with xp. In other words, make crafting, drop rate, gardening, and item/gil acquisition 10 times as easy. The consequence is everyone will have uber items. People who have uber items today will no longer stand out in the soon future. It will be unfair to ppl who acquired their uber items the "hard way", but this is as unfair as the high level who acquired their level the hard way under the new rule.
3) Make skilling up for crafting, fishing, chocobo-digging 10 times as easy. Again, the consequence is everyone will now have 100 crafting, and it's unfair to ppl who crafted the hard way, but this is just as unfair to the ppl who level the hard way.
I know ppl hate long post, so this is my summary. The following is a more detail discussion of my reasoning:
Opportunity cost. That's what I feel Square is stealing from me with the new xp rules. That's why I am mad with this xp change. Using Zarath's nice calculation and assumption, each lv 75 job loses 31 hours of opportunity. 31 hours! Yes this is 17% of xp from 51-75. And I think this is a lot! This is like working half time for a week! Or like losing out on 31 hours to lv another job you want! If you have 4 level 75 jobs, you are 4x screwed.
And heaven forbids if you are blessed with zero LFG or down time. If not, 31 hours can easily be 40++ hours. That's about 1 million gil at 30k/hour. It can be a lot more than 1 million gil if you have better means of making gil or if your leveling days were way back before the inflation. (leave the inflation part if you disagree with my take, let's not discuss economy in this xp topic)
Generally, you can think of every action you take as a choice and that you trade off one activity with another like withsilverwings said. However, this is only true if you look at time as a constant. . In this case of tnl change, time is not fixed. For each lv 75 job you have, you lose 31 hours of opportunity! With 31 more hours, it's no longer a trade off: you could have done more activities, xp, farming, or whatever.
Another way to see this situation is that Sqaure unfairly changed their reward preposititon to the players. It really pissed me off. AlbergoZz 's comment provides an excellent example for me: "Second, why are you pissed that you have an endgame character and people like myself who have spent a lot more time crafting and helping people and less leveling (not saying that you haven't) can have an easier time getting to 75."
You see, time, gil, item, and level are how Square rewards their players. They are also pretty interchaneable. You can trade time for gil/itm (farm), time for level (xp grind), gil for time (pay to ride that damn chocobo to move faster), or gil for level (eat food, expensive equipment, use consumable items).
Square's reward preposition to the player is currently at approximately 30k gil per hour or 1/10th of a level per hour, at lv71->72. (tnl is 40k, and at 4k/hour this is 1/10th of a level. I used 71-72 as an example b/c 124k is the total difference for lv 51 to 75, or 5.8k/level, and 5.8k is pretty close to 4k and is also a nice number).
Going back to my point, this is why I am really pissed: Square makes it easier to level, but doesn't compensate players who did it the hard way. Square also doesn't make it easier to acquire gil and item. Let say Square make items drop say ten times as much (strider boot, silk, whatever). Now, how do you professional nm hunter feel about this? The 100 hours you spent camping for Sozu now worth 10 hours. Let say instead of 1.0 to increas a craft level, it now takes .1. So starting at 0 gold smith, it takes you .1 once to become level 1 gold smith, instead of .1 ten times. Now, how do you crafter feel about this? You are probably better of having spent your time leveling in the past, because you wasted your time crafting in the past the hard way.
Update; Initially I posted this as a reply... but I really want more ppl to see my opinions, so i copied and pasted this as a new topic. sorry for the double post. I signed up for Allakhazam today after 1.5 years just to make this post.. mind as well..
Edited, Thu Apr 21 01:50:16 2005 by ChocoboSalad
