Quote Originally Posted by TheShogun View Post
Players are complaining about this, saying that their hard work to acquire good gear is being invalidated, as what once took them weeks to obtain can take new players a couple of days. These same players feel as if the endgame is “shrinking” and older content is no longer relevant and has no real purpose, rendering entire dungeons obsolete.When players work months to get to the level that a newbie can now reach in a week, it is hard to feel a large sense of progression, and it can become somewhat disheartening to see gear that used to be rare and difficult to obtain made common and easy to obtain.
I'm no FFXIV player but this happened in WoW like six years ago when Wrath of the Lich King (and to a lesser extent, late TBC) did exactly this. WoW progression used to involve working your way up through all the dungeons in turn, regardless of how long you'd been playing, but with WotLK every patch introduced new badge gear which made the last patch's dungeons basically obsolete.

Like Aulayna said this is basically modern MMO design now and I would be surprised if FFXIV didn't follow suit. I think some MMOs opt to try the more "hardcore" route but this is often at the cost of a strong playerbase (a la Wildstar). As much as we oldbies like to wave our canes and talk about Vanilla, MMOs being more accessible to new and/or returning players is, overall, a good thing.