yeah youre totally right, it was more of a lobby type thing
i played it a lot back before highschool, MMOs were like rlly popular back then
Yeah, I played it a lot too. Till they came out with the 'chaos update' then I was like "forget this stuff i'm out" because it invalidated all the hard work I just went through. I had every single 3rd job from Elesis all the way to Mari unlocked, as well as a couple of 4ths. 99% of it from GP. I think I only like, cashed out on Mari's 3rd and Lire's 2nd (when i was super new).
And then yeah. They're like "Lets remove 99% of the work from the game, everyone gets everything by running like 1 mission i hope you have fun, enjoy 3 levels per run!"