Raise the Minimum Requirement for entering Abyssea to Lv70 or 75

[Akujima]

Being able to remove status ailments and keeping haste up, requires practice? Being able to sleep an add or 2, requires practice? Meleeing a mob, maybe turning if necessary, requires practice? Really? I'm sorry but I disagree, it only requires you to pay attention and use some of that common sense I mentioned before.

You're claiming that your ability to perform these actions, has already reached its potential without any prior experience.

[Saefinn]

I think you can learn a certain amount from parties, I mean if you're nuking like hell, you're going to get hate so you'll learn to try and avoid hate even if it takes a few deaths to do so. But there's still plenty you can be ignorant towards, such as crowd control, when somebody in a party links the first thing I notice people try to do is leg it (and end up dying) or the party splits in two when there's at least one person in the party (usually me) who can sleep the mob. Even when I shout 'sleep', it doesn't necessarily sink in and they attack the mob. I'm the experimental type, so I take advantage of parties to experiment (without detriment to the party), but I realise not everybody is the experimental type. I find if I am experimental then at least I'm creating my own play style and people have no need to tell me how to play my job.

NMs can be good practice, I don't think levelling up the slow way will teach you the best way to help a party kill a NM, as a mage not only is it important that people stay alive and keep their health up but that status effects are removed and your MP is kept up and you've got to be tactical about everything. If you're just nuking or just healing in an exp party then you're not going to necessarily perform brilliantly well, which you can pretty much get away with in any exp party. I think with any job a person should practice with it and learn what they can do and how they can do it. I don't think whether it matters if you do an exp party and experiment that way or leech to 90 first and do it. Personally I found the former easier, but each to his own. I think both scenarios can create people who don't know how to play their job properly.

[Tamoa]

You're claiming that your ability to perform these actions, has already reached its potential without any prior experience.

Prior experience with what? The job? Or whatever it is that you're fighting?

You don't need experience in casting Paralyna if you are playing whm and you see "Monster starts casting Paralyga", or "Player is paralyzed". You don't need experience in casting CureV if the war's hp bar is @ 50%. You don't need experience in playing mnk or any other DD job to be able to turn if you see "The cockatrice readies Baleful Gaze". You don't need experience in playing blm to cast Stun if you see "Apademak starts casting Thunder V". You may need some experience in fighting the specific mobs/NMs, or read up/ask about them before the fight, but that's hardly the same thing.

[Saefinn]

Prior experience with what? The job? Or whatever it is that you're fighting?

You don't need experience in casting Paralyna if you are playing whm and you see "Monster starts casting Paralyga", or "Player is paralyzed". You don't need experience in casting CureV if the war's hp bar is @ 50%. You don't need experience in playing mnk or any other DD job to be able to turn if you see "The cockatrice readies Baleful Gaze". You don't need experience in playing blm to cast Stun if you see "Apademak starts casting Thunder V". You may need some experience in fighting the specific mobs/NMs, or read up/ask about them before the fight, but that's hardly the same thing.

If you're fighting specific mobs/NMs there will always be a first time, so you will be inexperienced. So a level of what you'll be doing is without prior experience, and reading up on them is therefore necessary as you say. I do it before any NM, "Paralyga", "Doom", "Petrify", I can automatically know how important my -na spells will be having never done the fight.

[Nacht]

Different people will have several levels of intelligence.
For a smart player, no, they are not going to learn anything about playing a job in a shitty exp party. They already know this information from playing their other jobs and reading etc.
For the mildly intelligent player, they probably won't learn much about playing a job in an exp party. They have experience from their other jobs etc.
For retarded players, they won't learn anything about playing a job in an exp party. They're too stupid to learn anything.

[Panthera]

Since you have said that these points have been addressed, I guess we can assume that you have no real response to them and have therefore conceded them.

With all due respect, what's going to be ignored are your arguements if you start shouting.

Italics are great, bold if you must if you can use restraint. An exlamation mark is fine when it's called for, but as Roger Ebert said, the only time he's ever used three exlamation marks in his entire career are when he talked about Megatron in the original live action Transformers, because Megatron is just a three exlamation mark kinda guy. All joking aside, the use of caps is shouting, and bold caps far worse.

Further, not everything and everyone in the thread are worth replying to. Some are merely trolls. Some posts don't just have flawed logic, they have no logic at all; there's just nothing to reply to. Some, and by no means all, are so poorly written they aren't worth taking seriously, that putting effort into a reply when they didn't put any in in the first doesn't make much sense. Further, some are so abrasive and dismissive in tone that they're just trolling, trying to the same angry, shouting reaction from you that it's just best to put them on ignore list, and OP would do well to heed this. Some of your points are good and worth addressing, but I can do without the shouting.

My definition of cheating in terms of leveling is using third party programs to do your levelling for you (people do use curebots, so this is actually there), or altering your character data to fix your level at whatever you want it to be. Buying accounts is cheating. Keying boxes does not meet this definition, therefore it is not cheating.

I'm really glad you brought this up.

Your meaning of cheating ignores the meanings plural of the word cheating. You are absolutely correct that third party leveling programs are cheating, and I'm glad that you recognize that. Similarly, do-nothing leeching is cheating because the leveling doesn't represent the leech's own work. Is there really anyone who is actually in favor of that? But you were talking about keymasters, and I'll address that.

Low-level keymastering is cheating because you're not leveling up in a way specific to or supported by your job, as I've said, as well as other definitions as well, which I've also already explained. Again, just becuase you aren't cheating according to one meaning, doesn't mean you aren't cheating according to others.

Using third party programs to choose what fish you hooked and instantly set its hp to 0 is cheating. Being able to see VNMs while they're still in their unaggrod state is cheating. RMT is cheating. See, I can define terms to my benefit, too, and mine is closer to SE's definition.

You do have a reasonable, but not infallible, grasp on what cheating is conceptually. However, I never defined the term cheating. The meanings plural of the word cheating were around before I used them. According to a dictionary website:...

cheat   
[cheet] Show IPA
–verb (used with object)
1.to defraud; swindle: He cheated her out of her inheritance.
2.to deceive; influence by fraud: He cheated us into believing him a hero.
3.to elude; deprive of something expected: He cheated the law by suicide.

I merely applied the definitions and the concepts to explain why leeching is cheating, and they're a perfect fit, if I may say. The real problem is that SE's rules for what cheating is and is not don't address what cheating really is in this context. You want to be closer to what cheating actually means, not what SE thinks it is, as they may not necessarally be close. Again, if there were a body-building competition, and for whatever reason, the use of steroids were explicity allowed, that doesn't mean that those who take steroids aren't cheating, and that doesn't meant they aren't cheating
those that don't use them. This is a key point, because keymasters don't just cheat, they cheat me and those who level in real way. In this analogy, the rules just don't make sense, as they don't support what cheating is conceptually. Again, just because it isn't against the rules, doesn't mean it's not cheating.

I leveled my rng from 20 to 56 via campaign ops and xp scrolls. Did I cheat by doing that? I sure didn't go out and get oldschool xp parties.

You haven't completely made a connection between the two. I am not obligated to make your arguements for you. You tell me? How and why are doing those not cheating by definions (plural now!) and how does that make keymastering not cheating, and why? I'd like to know.

As to the RPG element; Sure, xp is a key factor in all of them. But when you have one character that you want to use to do something different, do you take him through all the areas in the game that you've been through and catch him up like that? No, you slap him in the party with your top characters, go to the spot in the game where the monsters give a ton of xp, and use your strong characters to tear through them like paper and skyrocket your weak character's levels.

Yes, this would level up the characters quickly. But in those games, the weaker characters aren't opening chests, and I'm pre-supposing they were participating in the battle by fighting monsters, or being fought by them. Again, chests don't try to kill you, that's part of why it's leeching and therefore cheating.

Some RPGs even level your characters while they're out of party (e.g. Chrono Trigger).

It is my assessment that yes, those characters were do-nothing leeches, that much should be obvious. The experienced gained by the lower level members did not reflect their own work at all. And I'm interested to know if you think do nothing leeches are OK, as you've only addressed keymasters specifically, but not do-nothing leeches. It would seem to be, but I'd like to hear that from you. You cannot say that they aren't leeching and therefore aren't cheating in the one and not the other.

That the game has it built-in doesn't mean it isn't cheating. Using a non RPG game analogy, there's Warp Whistles in Mario 3, the original Super Mario had warp pipes, etc. Activision's famous cheat codes, supported by the game by design, are still cheats! They don't pretend that they're not. They are short-cuts that completely evade, they are cheating. There's a funny bit about this on College Humor that explains it. http://www.collegehumor.com/video/61...-warp-whistles

It's not that you got to the final level of Mario(and notice how we're still talking about "levels"), it's how you got there. Suppose the game supported warping from the first level to the last. There's a difference between saying,"I saw the Super Mario Credits," which isn't really winning, and "I beat every single level of of Super Mario."

Being able to use strong characters to level weak characters has always been a part of many games in the genre, even in SE games.

That still doesn't mean that the near-convention isn't cheating. If most body building competition explicitly allowed steroids as a convention does't mean it's not cheating in each and every instance.

As I've said before, this game, Final Fantasy XI, actually makes it so that characters who are lower level than the highest party member are penalized in exp, and as far as monster exp goes, it's the same way in Abyssea as well, to the best of my knowledge. Given the penalty, I'd say SE actually discourages this in the context of FFXI exping. I'd like to hear from SE why level 30 characters, who's negligible contribution to a battle against a monster that's almost level 100 should be allowed to get 5000 experience points for a whopping 5 mobs. Why have an exp level difference penalty in some cases, but not others? It's inconsistent.

I really appreciate that you brought this up. You don't evade what RPGs are, you address it intelligently. I've enjoyed this exchange, Khiinroye. I eagerly await your rebuttal.

[Panthera]

Browsing quickly through the last pages of this thread, and I just have to comment on this.

Grinding exp in oldfashioned exp parties doesn't teach you the above. It's called common sense.

If you know whichever mob you are fighting can use an AoE spell or move, you stay out of range when you're a mage. If you don't know - well you stay out of range anyway, just in case! And if you cast Blindna on the war when he's @ 25% hp instead of a cure, then you have no business being on whm or rdm.

Funny thing is - I still see people do this today, people that I know have played whm or rdm since well before Abyssea. And coming across players on jobs that use some form of magic but don't carry something like echo drops, is almost a daily occurrence.

Again, people that have been playing for a long time, maining something like pld (when that was still a relevant job).

Point is, grinding exp on pink birds and whatnot, doesn't teach you much if anything at all.

Common sense and willingness to learn is what it's about.

(My bold)

Common sense really means one of two things: good judgement, or intuition. Someone standing in front of a door where people are trying to walk in and out of showing no "common sense," to mean that they are showing poor judgement.

In the sense that common sense is "intuition," I don't believe there's such a thing in this context. Man and many creatures are born as a Tabula Rasa, a blank slate, knowing absolutely nothing. A baby deer will walk right up to a predator, as its mother watches on in terror. The baby deer has no way of knowing that the predator is about to have an easy meal. The mother deer knows because she's seen it before. No one knows what AOE is until they've learned it either from reading about it, or from experience, no one "just knows to stay out of AOE because it's common sense."

Colibri do not teach you everything, but it's hyperbolic to suggest that's the only anyone has ever fought in their entire job leveling career. If they did, this is a case where the process has failed the player. If the player doesn't learn from opportunities, then the player has failed the process. The leveling path is still supposed to prepare players for end game by giving them the fundamentals. It is about good judgement and willingness to learn, and I would add, the ability to learn.

I appreciate your contribution nevertheless, Tamoa.

[Arlan]

You're claiming that your ability to perform these actions, has already reached its potential without any prior experience.

Actually, Tamoa is claiming that it doesn't take that long to learn these basic actions at all.
And I agree with him.
It doesn't take that long to learn these basic actions, specially for a new player since all it needs a little explaining and being able to pay attention for the right times.

[Pharaun]

(My bold).

You're contradicting yourself. Here's why.

To paraphrase, what you say're is that having a pre-ToAU was an accomplishment in an absolute sense. Post-ToAU, it was no longer an accomplishment in an absolute sense. Then you say that because of various factors, things that used to be accomplishments are less so now in a relative sense. You can't have it both ways. They have to be either accomplishments then but not now, or big accomplishments then and smaller accomplishments now, but not both. As an aside, saying "worth nothing" qualifies the accomplishment to be as as naught for it to have value, in an absolute vs. relative sense.

It was never my contention that getting to 90 didn't get easier over time; I understand that perfectly. clearly it did. Getting a 75 pre ToAU was a bigger accomplishment than post, but it was still an accomplishment. Getting to 90 by leveling ones job in a way specific to or supported by that job in Abyssea is less so, but still has some value. Standing around AFK is not an accomplishment at all, such that it takes away from the meaning of having a 90 from those who put forth effort.

Please go back and read my argument again because you misread it. I never said having a max level character was worth nothing, I said it wasn't worth noting, I never made a statement in the absolute sense it was all relative. I never contradicted myself, your lack of reading comprehension created the perceived contradiction. I merely stated the reasons why what used to be an accomplishment will become much less of one with the natural progression of games of this nature.

[Panthera]

Please go back and read my argument again because you misread it.

Very well then.

As for Panthera and his assertion that hitting max level was an accomplishment, it hasn't been an accomplishment to have a max level character since ToAU at the latest if not earlier.

Now, here, what you're saying is that it's not an accomplishment, period. You didn't say less of one, more of one, or just as much of one. You said not an accomplishment, full stop. You don't seem to know what "not an" means. Had your sentence said,"As for Panthera and his assertion that hitting max level was an accomplishment, it hasn't been as much of an accomplishment to have a max level character pre-ToAU than post TaOU at the latest if not earlier," then that would mean that it was relatively less of an accomplishment, and a contradiction would not have existed, because even without the bit about "worth noting," it was clear that you meant that in a relative sense. One was absolute, the other was relative, you contradicted yourself.

It's not up to me to go back from the second paragraph to figure out what you meant by the first, but your responsiblity to make yourself clear from the get-go. I understood what you actually said clearly. What I did not understand was what you meant. Any misunderstanding on my end has nothing to do with a presumed lack of reading comprehension on my end. It's because of an inability to say what you mean accurately and clearly on your end. And when I did say you were contradicting yourself the first time, I managed to do so without sounding rude. I was courteous the first time, I don't owe you that now, and I can no longer be bothered with you.