This is something I've been thinking about lately as a lot of our FC members who joined at the PS4 launch have dinged 50 over the last few weeks. Think about how much has changed since when a lot of us probably hit 50. If you hit level 50 today, you can pretty much immediately unlock all of the following:
-Wanderer's Palace
-Amdapor Keep
-Pharos Sirius
-Lost City of Amdapor
-Haukke Manor HM
-Copperbell Mines HM
-Brayflox Longstop HM
-Halatali HM
-Crystal Tower
(Granted, there are iLVL requirements for some of these but they are very low and easy to hit pretty quick)
Now, as a fresh 50, think about your options for gearing up as soon as you get there. WP and AK drop i55 gear. Pharos, Haukke, and Copperbell drop i60. Brayflox, Halatali, and Amdapor drop i70, or you can buy a set of i70 gear if you've got the cash. Crystal Tower drops i80. All of these drop myth tomes that can be used to purchase i90 gear, or you can spend gil to buy i90 pieces, or you can run the first coil for i90 drops (after a bit of gearing). All of these drop soldiery tomes as well which can be used to purchase i100 gear.
It just seems really odd to me that you instantly have access to a range of 50 iLVLs worth of gear as soon as you ding 50, and I wonder if maybe these things shouldn't be staggered a bit for fresh 50s so that they have to progress their way up to the good stuff. Thinking back to when I first hit 50, I can remember wearing Hoplite pieces for a while as I farmed the tomes needed to get Darklight pieces. At that point I was starting to buy my Valor gear, while supplementing my gear with the odd piece from CT. Then, I could work on buying the i100 stuff. It's a nice reasonable progression... I had to work myself up to the good stuff. Nowadays I don't think that's necessarily the case - since you pretty much unlock everything at once there's no real need to bother with the i55 or i60 stuff when you can pretty much jump straight to i90 or i100.
Now the solution to this is in the game already, it's just not implemented very well... all of these have iLVL requirements to run. If you've ever been paired up with a DPS using a level 46 weapon in Haukke, though, you know that these iLVL requirements are set awfully low. I'd like to see these iLVLs bumped up a bit so that newer players at 50 can work their way up through the gear progression a bit. You can't run the dungeons that drop i60 gear until you've got a few pieces over i50, you can't run the dungeons that drop i70 gear until it's a little bit higher, etc. I think this breathes a bit more life into some of the dungeons at the lower end of the scale (WP/AK, CT), holds players attention over time a bit better (it gives them more to work towards instead of just - BAM - i100), and maybe helps keep lvl 50 from being so overwhelming at first ("I just hit 50, what do I do first?").
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that any of this is negatively impacting my playing of the game in any way. I also realize that there's really no putting that horse back in the barn at this point... it's not likely to change. I'm also aware of the fact that a lot of people will probably disagree with me 100% and think I'm an idiot. I'm just interested in hearing what people think about it.