Power leveling, book burns, Speed leveling. What is the appeal?

[Tsuneo]

Like other people have said the options to do such things was never taken away, but the fact that majority of people don't prefer the old method of leveling speaks for itself.

[thenewzero]

For me, the only option you mentioned that is appealing is book burns. I enjoy those, more than I enjoyed most exp parties back in the day. I never enjoy being powerlevelled or other burn party types. But I also like to play a more active role in the book burns (being a puller, or a healer, not just sitting around).

There are several reasons book burns appeal to me.

1.) Invites are usually quick.
2.) A person leaving the group does not mean massive downtime or the group immediately falling apart.
3.) More people to talk to, and a more casual environment to talk in.
4.) You aren't expected to have very expensive gear that you will only be keeping for low level content.
5.) You will get invited to a party even if you're not playing a Job that is considered "must-have" (no more lolDRG or lolPUP).
6.) Progress is tangible and, more importantly, guaranteed. (No more strong chance of losing exp because of one or two bad players.)
7.) Leveling is no longer a massively daunting task that comprises the majority of your gameplay time, which leads to real content being more achievable for new players and for more veteran players to try Jobs they may have never previously considered without investing a gargantuan amount of time into the tedium of killing the same crawlers for hours upon hours.
8.) Gives solid incentive to stay with a group (retaining a high page exp chain), while not forcing you to stay if something comes up.
9.) If you have to / want to leave suddenly, you aren't costing the group a lot of downtime or forcing them to stop playing.
10.) Softens the level ranges you can enter a new area.

Overall, it makes the leveling process less stressful, less rigid, and more freeform, while speeding up the blandest part of the game (leveling). The majority of an MMO should not be built around trying to qualify for interesting content.

[Texx-sylph]

returning back to play after 4 years. my original pg was deleted (hacked + banned ;_
now i restart from level one with no subjob, no rank, no anything.
new possibility to levelup faster grants me the opportunity to recover fast what i've lost.
i cannot play so mutch time and i leveled only one job in the first 5 years of play (pld75).
many times, after changes, fixings and so on, my pally become useful, mandatory, garbage... means situational.
if i would like to have a better role in game i had to level ninja. but i cannot for time.
so now the possibility to have a new life, exping the jobs better, should be a great opportunity.
i agree that this fast exp grants also to ppl don't know his job to have high lev/gears.
but i think that people thyat willing to play in a proper way his job, are still here. so maybe the problem is when you are playing with shouts and not with linksheel mates. in that case of course the level or the equip is not saying "i'm god on my job!"... but having a small gourp of ppl, that knows how to play... grants you the possibility to have so many choiches that in the past are not allowed (in my case, i cannot imagine in the prevoius way, to have 2 or 3 jobs capped... now as a galka i would like to take the "risk" to level all mages jobs).

just my 2 cents

[Camiie]

When I did bird parties in Aht Urghan there was no time for fun. It was GO GO GO! No time to type silly comments or there goes the chain. In low level parties you often had that chance because it was just such slow going. Waiting for pull, waiting for a rep, waiting for weakness, waiting for the damned crab to just die already....

To me, the new way of grouping actually lends itself MORE to being social. You have larger groups fighting relatively weaker mobs without either too much pressure or too much downtime. Dare I say it is balanced? I don't feel as though I'm going to ruin the party if I start cracking jokes or discussing the local sports team or some TV show. I also don't feel as though I'm being lulled to sleep by the glacial pace of an old school dunes/mid-level party.

Honestly, I have way more fun and am a lot more social in an Abyssea group, so I really don't see how old parties were better in that regard.

[Concerned4FFxi]

Maybe instead of nerfing book xp bonus from completing a page, an xp bonus could be given to people in a six person or less pt. I see what the op means, some of the best and worst times I've had were in the old camps. Avoiding goblins in the dunes, the undead at night in qufim, the goblin in yhoater when pulling mandies near the book camp, etc. However, many other valid points have been made in this thread, also. The way xp is now is most reasonable and totally more enjoyable in a time vs. reward fashion. Like I said though, there needs to be some bonus offered to parties that in a non-alliance outside abyssea fashion. I occasionally do low level content for the fun and to take a break at times but except for book burning its very hard to find an old school pt. There's a better chance of finding a duo/trio than old school parties.

Also, all the old content that dropped rare logs/ores/etc are outdated with abyysea chests. So it's really a shame they did it that way. I see their logic, they made things more accessiable and cheaper, but totally destroyed a majority of the game they had in the process.

[Saefinn]

I found the old parties to be more interesting, just because they were harder, required fewer people and gave you room to get a feel for the job you're playing. Book burns, it is pretty much boring, there's no challenge and it's just a lot of enemies dropping to the floor and starting up with the next pretty quickly. However, the exp is fantastic. Admittedly, with Book Burns I actually feel more inclined to key whore and I have. I can either be bored and getting lots of exp or I can be bored and gets lots more exp. In an ideal world, I'd be having fun and getting lots of exp, I get that the big grinds did get boring after a while and yes, I got pretty sick of Valkurm Dunes and Qufim Island as they were the easiest areas to find parties.

It was doing the old exp parties where I found my love for SCH and COR, for SCH it was in Western Altepa Desert on the beetles, realising that I was pretty good at curing and DDing at the same time - managing between 2 schools of magic and adapted to the pace of the fights rather than being set into one frame of mind. At that point I ditched my DRK and took my SCH to level 70 and took out Schultz then took it to 90. I also discovered my play style.

On the side of being social, I never struggled, even when as a healer - I just timed my responses, even in WG. In fact, I got quite social with some very awesome people I STILL talk to and team up with in game. Also, if you had a decent puller, you didn't wait for a pull. :P Sadly, I wasn't THAT brilliant of a puller myself, so I managed to avoid it, except when on COR .

3k/hour was average for a bad party. With the right set up you avoided that. I remember one guy and his PL on our server being a master of Dunes parties, he'd managed to sustain an average of 16-18k/hr from level 10-20. It was insane and it wasn't even boring, it was actually quite fun, because you'd still have to play your jobs well and you didn't spend time on just one camp, we went around 4 or 5 different ones to keep the exp high. Also, if you had a BRD, a COR and PL, exp was also pretty damn epic too. When I was levelling COR we literally sped through Qufim Island through to Yhoator Jungle. BRD did ACC & ATT buffs, I did ATT & EXP buffs and DD'd.

In my opinion, the solution would have been to increase the exp even further. I think we'd still be finding classic exp parties, but without them droning on a bit too far. I see little point if you're doing something in game that's boring, it just becomes a means to an end rather than playing a game.

[Vivik]

Wow, nice necro bump. Here I had almost forgot about Rosina. She was special...

[CrAZYVIC]

FFXI never had and never will have a good balanced level system.

A mmrpg without good designed lving system is losing 1 of parts more important in a "Rol playing game"

FFXI always had a horrible party system.
Abbysea was good but let the players in at lv 30 was the biggest mistake the devs did. That finished of fuck the lv system in the game.

I liked fields of valor, that had nice exp rate depending of your lv. If 8 years ago Fields of valor without the 1 hour cold down was implement the exp parties could reach 20 - 30k per hour and solo/duo 12 - 15k, fixing the level system in the game.

Square enix is in crysis, not only in FFXI.

In my opinion Square enix is in decadence they are making products for the big masses of people and they are forgeting the qualify in their products.

Examples

FF13 have the qualify Skyrim? FF13 is junk compared with Skyrim
FF11 have very short devs team. Square Enix wish leech our money without enough work.
FF14 was a terrible fail, they now want a second oportunity with FF14 2.0 Lets see if they can save that game.

In conclusion when this company start make products with qualify again, we will see results.