Originally Posted by
Stompa
Well.
New players join the game, they don't know how it is played, and they are looking to Veteran Players for GUIDANCE.
As we see in this thread, many of the Veteran players are /yelling merc shouts all day.
New players hear the wall-to-wall merc yells all day, and just assume that just buying progress from veteran mercs, is how everybody plays the game.
I was on Remora for six years, and I never heard a single merc shout, not once, in six years. We had no choice but to play the game, camp our own NMs, learn to play our jobs expertly, learn to deal with failure, and develop endurance to attain long-term goals. The option of buying from mercs did not exist, not for 99% of normal players on our server. So we made our own friend groups, our own linkshells, and we beat the game by ourselves, the way the game was intended to be played. And in doing so, we developed stout friendships that have lasted for sixteen years.
On Leviathan, I have heard maybe three merc shouts in eight years. Again, a new player is unlikely to hear merc shouts. They will play the game, and team up with other new players to have exciting adventures, and form lasting friendships.
Yes, it is true, that we can all do whatever we want, but a new player is looking to Veterans for Guidance. New players place their trust in Veterans. And if Veterans are acting like Gangster Mercs, just selling everything, then the new players are going to think that this is normal traditional FFXI behaviour, which it is not. This was always an outlaw minority behaviour, until recent times, on certain servers.
And if we take a group of ten new adventurers, five of them hear all the /yells and decide to join a merc run, the remaining five new adventurers will have lost five potential allies, who could have played the game with them, in the normal adventuring way. Eventually all ten of them will just go join the merc runs, since they will feel left out if they decide to play the game normally.
I am opposed to mercenary, gangster, bandit activity. I feel it kills the adventuring RPG spirit of the game. It steals adventures and friendships from entire generations of new players.
What we are talking about is the dynamic situation at ground level. Not little pinhole mini-quotes on a forum.