Raise the Minimum Requirement for entering Abyssea to Lv70 or 75

[Chocobits]

Look. Panthera's point on Parasitic and Symbiotic relationships is the single most valid point that has been touched in this entire thread. If you don't know anything about those types of relationships, go LvUp and gain some experience to figure out how each of them is different.

Panthera... Thank you for having what counts most: Common Sense.

From your perspective, it is, because he's like-minded.

To 90% of the other readers, Leon, Ramona and myself make the most valid points, because we're sane and our logic is based on the common good and not a personal agenda.

[Svens]

This is still going? News flash: You can now leech abyssea-style from GoV pages once the exp cap is reached, racking up 3000-4000+ exp/page depending on how hard the page is (600-700 exp/mob give or take). Only difference is you click the tome every time a regiment is complete vs. completely afking and you get gil/tabs vs cruor as a secondary bonus. And you can start at lv1 instead of lv30.

So if players want to restrict access to Abyssea, should we restrict access to Vanadiel?

[Chocobits]

This is still going? News flash: You can now leech abyssea-style from GoV pages once the exp cap is reached, racking up 3000-4000+ exp/page depending on how hard the page is (600-700 exp/mob give or take). Only difference is you click the tome every time a regiment is complete vs. completely afking and you get gil/tabs vs cruor as a secondary bonus. And you can start at lv1 instead of lv30.

So if players want to restrict access to Abyssea, should we restrict access to Vanadiel?

Is Lumoria considered outside of Vanadiel? People might leech in Sea.

[Svens]

Is Lumoria considered outside of Vanadiel? People might leech in Sea.

I want to say it is a part of Vanadiel as it is part of the world/dimension and a counterpart does exist in Abyssea as your Abyssean counterpart loses to Promathia. There is Walk of Echoes, but people already leech there, so...yeah...

[Kindra]

Hear are my thoughts and this will be the third time I say this.

Some of you like abyssea, some of you don't, I happen to be one of those that likes both. The problem here is that both sides are set in their thinking and neither side is going to change their minds. This is a debate that will go on forever because you can't make each other think the same way. Let's face it guys everyone has their own ways of doing things. We may not like them or even agree with them but the one thing we will never accomplish is making them change their minds.

And I want to make sure that the we in that last statement doesn't mean I agree with either side. Like I said I like both ways.

[Khiinroye]

People don't complain about killing NMs in abyssea over and over because the reward is quick--with a pickup group of 4, you can get a +1 piece of gear in about 2 hours. Oldschool xp, you might have gone from lv 37 to lv 38 in CN.

As for empyreans--those are, for many of them, the best weapon of their type in the game. Even going at a casual 4 hours per day average, you can get most of them to lv 85 in two or three weeks. (empyrean weapons involving glavoid or chloris might take longer if you're unlucky with cleaving KIs, harp/shield take longer due to VNM upgrades). Since they're currently the best of their class, people expect to have to work more for them. Shirley, you've seen the relic / mythic / empyrean threads.

While there are still some new players, most of the players have been around for a while. The majority of us have leveled to 60+ before abyssea, many with several lv 75 jobs. Skills from these jobs carry over, as does knowledge.

Say you played warrior and ninja, and have tanked a myriad of mobs, and have mostly capped skills on those jobs since you need that to trigger in abyssea. However, for a change, you leech whm to 90, and your subjobs to 49. Put on your sch sub, light arts, instant B- rank skill; not optimal, but still better than whm's base skill for everything except divine and healing. You'll know how important haste is for melees, and will try to keep it up. You'll know the benefits of protect, shell, barspells, etc. You'll definitely know what moves give additional status effects, and what spell is needed to cure them. You'll need to pick up mp management and where you should stand as a mage, but that's something that's quick.

If instead you want to pick up a melee job, you'll already have the main weapon skilled a good portion of the way to 90. This includes scythe, GS, axe, GA, dagger, GK, polearm. You might even have decent h2h, archery, and marksmanship if you like blue numbers. There really aren't that many job abilities to learn on a new job melee job, and if you payed attention while leveling your old jobs, you'll know what they do.

New players will have to take a break from xping at lv 70 anyways, since they won't be able to beat G5 with vastly underlevelled skills. The two exceptions are whm (divine magic skilling only, sleep Maat for 5 minutes to win) and thf (successfully steal to win). Any other melee will need to skill their main weapon, and mages will need to work on their magic skills.

The only problem for new players is being able to afford gear. Cruor can be traded for items that net a bit of gil, but it will probably still fall a bit short. Teal/Aurore/Perle gear is decent for a new player to start with, but they should work to get better gear to replace it.

Anyways, if you find someone in your alliance who is trying to pass as a DD with the skill of a lv 30 job, kick them. Tell them that they need to skill up to an acceptable level before continuing to level that particular job. Its not abyssea's fault that the person is inconsiderate and intentionally gimping himself by not skilling up.

Most alliances only have 1 or 2 lowbies keying chests. Sure, a brd or cor could open them between songs, but you almost never have those in pickup alliances, and if you do, they'd really rather not be spending a ton of cruor on a pickup alliance instead of gaining it. Since the low level people are taking care of a boring job that nobody wants to do, they allow the higher levels to play as they wish. It's more like the relationship between an ER doctor and the garbage man than it is a dog and a flea. If someone is paying to get their job leveled in abyssea, its more like a homeowner and a lawn service.

The lv 75+s who stand off to the side or at the dominion npc and don't do anything at all need to go, but nobody here is arguing against that.

You may argue that the fast xp will let people finish with everything faster, get bored, and quit sooner, but I believe that if you force lower level xp to be slow again, most people will give up on leveling new jobs, and have fewer options for doing the existing content, which will cause them to quit. The option to quickly level a new job every now and then gives the opportunity for a fresh perspective on the content--having the option to play as a healer or nuker or melee dd or tank is far less confining than being pidgeonholed into one or two styles due to a lack being able to quickly expand your job selection.

[TybudX]

No. I said that "It misleads people that you've been playing your job for 90 levels, when all you've done at best is just open chests." I say it's cheating because it's misleading... to deprive, mislead, evade, or act dishonestly.

So this is the heart of your argument?

You cannot say that I am cheating by 'leeching' any of my three accounts to have level 90 jobs. Functionally they are the same; that is, they are all me. I can play on all three accounts on any job and nobody would be able to tell the difference between the newer characters and my old character if they didn't already know me. I am in no way misleading anybody I come into contact with. I have not deprived anybody of anything by leeching my alts. I am not evading learning any skill or game mechanic that I don't already know, despite having leveled many jobs recently that I had never played past level 37 before. I make no claims when I do join events as to how I leveled my characters or how skilled I am at playing them.

In fact, the onus is on the people playing with me to not make unfounded assumptions about me based on their opinions. Abyssea has been around for some time now, and before that there were AB parties. It's safe to assume that a large portion of the population has 'leeched' one or more of the jobs that they play on. Nobody is being dishonest about it. Nobody is being mislead except for people who choose to walk around with blinders on. Nobody is evading the skills you learn during traditional experience parties because quite frankly you don't learn much of anything by fighting a few select monsters over and over again for weeks or months.

Now, how about some context?

I know somebody who has played PLD since at least 2006, who has completed an Aegis, who has been tanking in an HNM ls for three years. He leveled his PLD in traditional experience parties. This player joins events with the express intention of being main tank, many times suggesting party set ups that make him the sole tank. Despite having proper buffs, proper support, and good party set ups, this player cannot maintain shadows, keep hate, control a mob, manage his MP pool, or generally do what a PLD tank is supposed to be able to do, especially after 5 years of playing it.

Isn't that misleading? And doesn't misleading = cheating by definition? Despite him playing PLD the way he plays PLD, despite SE 'legitimizing' his play style, he has mislead many, many groups into thinking he can do something that he is incapable of doing.

Isn't that dishonest? And doesn't dishonest = cheating by definition? He claims to have skills that he learned while leveling his job and tanking HNMs, but is incapable of implementing these skills.

[Panthera]

Not responding to the rest of your post because time and again you've shown your pure selfishness throughout your posts are are just arguing semantics that don't really matter.

It's more likely you aren't responding because you just don't have a counter argument. The analogy is that I'm an Abyssea mob, and you're level 30, and you should not be in Abyssea. That's admittedly condescending, for which I apologize, but while I don't agree with GreatGuardian on the other hand, but I did really, sincerely like and respect his bit about how he thinks I think FFXI is an RPG so therefore etc. It was a good effort. I would just once like to be able to say in this thread,"I just can't argue with that."

What I find selfish is taking the prestige of an accomplishment in an MMO just so that you can have the same accomplishments, but without the same effort. Showing no regard to what others have earned, that you have cheated for, that's selfish.

Semantics do matter because truth is contigent upon it. We are arguing what is and what is not. And with all due respect, if I am arguing semantics, it's because you don't know what words mean. You can't just claim "A" is "B" when really it's "C" when you don't know what "A", "B" or "C" really mean.

But try to get this through your head. for you it is about accomplishments. Not for everybody. Nor does it have to be for everybody just because you have pride in a video game.

No, I understand perfectly that some don't care about earning their levels. I get that. I just don't agree with it, and I don't think they should. I have to be able to understand it in order to wag my finger disapprovingly at it. It's already been explained how your cheating takes from my accomplishment, and how cheating effects those who want to level but do it honestly.

Nor does accomplishment have to = XP.

Correct. Accomplishments don't have to be experience points, but experience points DO have to be accomplishments, or why bother? If they don't matter, remove them. Do them, or don't do them, but just don't cheat. Get a Relic, but don't RMT it. Get a Lu Shang's or Ebisu's, but don't fishbot it, etc. In an MMO, part of the value of certain items are their rarity. Back in the day, having certain jobs at 75 meant something, because they were difficult to get to there, but valuable and praise-worthy once they did get there. Now you can have those jobs at max level, but so what? So does everyone else by extensive thumb-twiddling. Your leeching (by which I mean "one", not you personally) does not exist in a vacuum. Forgive me for "[b]", but I am no more imposing my will onto others such that levels matter than they are imposing theirs on me by taking that value away. Now, what have you to say to that, hmmm?

Not everybody has to play the game under your way. Sticking to what SE allows is good enough for me.

And what SE rules is legal doesn't mean it's not side-stepping or short-cutting. Up up down down left right left right B A is one thing in the context of an offline game, but in an online game, it's quite something else. If if isn't against the rules to cheat, the rules are insufficient.

Provided that you are just repeating yourself without offering up anything new, it's nothing more than an attempt to win the arguement by getting in the last word in. The arguement that is true will always prevail over the last word that isn't.

[TybudX]

What I find selfish is taking the prestige of an accomplishment in an MMO just so that you can have the same accomplishments, but without the same effort.

Really?

It might take a great deal of effort to do what you're doing, but that doesn't mean you aren't cheating.

You have no problem arbitrarily discounting the amount of effort it took me to level three characters at once, even going so far as to call it cheating.

And what SE rules is legal doesn't mean it's not side-stepping or short-cutting... if isn't against the rules to cheat, the rules are insufficient.

Again, this is your assumption based on what you think SE may or may not think. Unfortunately for you SE does have the sole responsibility of deciding what is and isn't legal in their game. They own it, they control it, and they hold that the state of the game may change at any time. How you or I interpret their rules is irrelevant. It's not our decision.

[Akujima]

Isn't that misleading? And doesn't misleading = cheating by definition? Despite him playing PLD the way he plays PLD, despite SE 'legitimizing' his play style, he has mislead many, many groups into thinking he can do something that he is incapable of doing.

Isn't that dishonest? And doesn't dishonest = cheating by definition? He claims to have skills that he learned while leveling his job and tanking HNMs, but is incapable of implementing these skills.

This PLD argument is a moot point, because everyone knows that PLD as a job itself is broken. The player you're describing is misleading himself into thinking otherwise, due to the fact that he's invested so much time and energy into the PLD job. He is blind to face the facts that PLD is not working as intended.