Farming was built into the system. Notice how there is a sp bar and how they decrease the amount of sp xp you get by 400 times to convert it to sp. It's made to be a farming game. I don't know if they really intended the sp rewards from the quests to be so small though... It's like, "wow, I get 2000 sp from this quest? awesome!" only to find out that is only 5 sp.
Major changes before the most recent ones...
- alias system(can only use one job, no 1* protection after lvl 40, hunters gain gold from trades)
- stall network
- I remember they reduced the crit value of everyone's weapon by 1 in an inspection, and never changed it back
- removed the ability for npc thieves to attack normal players
- changed it so that when you click restart, you get logged out instead of taken to the character select