You haven’t heard enough about Final Fantasy XI till you’ve read this.

Since its North American release in 2004, FFXI has been trucking right along, and recently found itself on the bad end of a rep-damaging media blitz. Square-Enix’s newest counter-attack is the announcement of a formerly top-secret modification of truly epic proportions, and it’s inspired disgruntled players to start singing their praises.

With the aptly named “Level Sync” feature, characters who are maxed out at the level cap of 75 can enter a party with people at a lower level (e.g., 20), and they’ll all gain the same amount of Experience Points together. They won’t have to change jobs (which in other MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, is akin to changing characters), and won’t even need to buy a set of lower equipment. In fact, the system will automatically and appropriately scale down the stats on whatever armor they’re wearing, which saves inventory space and prevents a lot of headaches.

Furthermore, this alleviates a long-running problem in FFXI: overcrowding. Trying to get a proper camp for Experience Points used to mean going for the throats of your fellow players, and stealing all of their enemies. Because of the Level Sync system, one “younger” player may invite all of their maxed-out friends to an easier, remote area of the game, and kill a bunch of opponents without a hint of competition.

It may be difficult to understand if you’ve never played Final Fantasy XI, but it’s a massive change that must have taken an unprecedented amount of work to implement. It’s impressive that the development team would do something this gargantuan this far along in the game’s life, and the announcement could not have come at a more perfect time.

Here’s the official link if you’re desperate for more information; I’d continue talking about it, but it’s time to clean out all the low level crap in my in-game storage.