Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Eyeballed]

I found leveling White Mage in pick-up groups miserable for the 50-75 stretch because of how misinformed and esoterically equipped 90% of the melee were, even relative to the limited knowledge available at that time. There were a lot of people who were so dense that, even to me on my first job going to 75 for the first time, it was obvious they were retarding progress. As the healer, all I could do to make them flail around less horribly was cast Haste and Dia II. It was infuriating.

I stuck it out because end-game looked interesting for support jobs, even if watching a handful of mental invalids fail to efficiently kill various species of crabs killed something deep inside of me.

That was my subjective experience. Your subjective experience is that you enjoyed leveling up by killing more crabs than the bearded boat bros on The Deadliest Catch.

You are trying to make your experience into something objective. That is not the case.

I think you answered your own question here; Obviously this was early on in the game's history and people were simply noobs on the whole. I mean, fair enough all you had to do was stack MND/MP, (if even that to be effective), where if you had a problem sticking Dia something was terribly wrong, and if you couldn't stick Haste, you might give MNK a try instead.

As well, I feel you're also attempting to objectify your experience in an even more acute sense with regard to a single job for a span of 15 levels. I'm referring to all jobs from levels 1-75 (99?).

PS: Your sig is the best I've seen in a long time.

[SpankWustler]

As well, I feel you're also attempting to objectify your experience in an even more acute sense with regard to a single job for a span of 15 levels. I'm referring to all jobs from levels 1-75.

I tried not to, but my feelings probably bled through a bit because my experiences are from the opposite end of the spectrum. I just wanted to provide an example that lots of people had lots of different experiences.

There were some people who did little other than level back when leveling had a much slower pace, and enjoyed it. Others leveled jobs as quickly as possible, hanging out with Shiva in Korroloka Tunnel rather than leveling normally when possible; they wanted to use a certain job for end-game, to fill a niche within their linkshells, or just to equip the armor they had accrued for that job via free-lot. I mostly met the latter kind of player, given that I was the latter kind of player, but I have no idea which group made up the majority at the time.

I don't think anybody else has any idea which group made up the majority, either. I also doubt the player base could be divided neatly into groups. It's so hard to collect data on the mental state of large groups of people that there are statistical tactics for using normally problematic sample sizes to get representative results in the social sciences.

Basically, I have no faith in my ability or anyone's ability to have knowledge of what's good or bad for FFXI players as a whole. If somebody tried to make the point that almost all players hated leveling more than my racist uncle hates brown people, I would find that dubious as well.

It's cool that some people liked leveling at the slower pace. I'm glad somebody really liked it to balance out how much I hated it. I just find any implication of a "silent majority" to be very, very, very suspect and one or both sides always make that implication when this topic comes up.

PS: Your sig is the best I've seen in a long time.

Thanks! I saw the image and it's dimensions seemed perfect for a signature.

I would post a link to the maker's Tumbler but there's some NSFW stuff there. Typing "Paul Robertson" into Google and checking out his Tumblr should do the trick, though. Again, there is some NSFW stuff there.

[Eyeballed]

I don't think anybody else has any idea which group made up the majority, either. I also doubt the player base could be divided neatly into groups. It's so hard to collect data on the mental state of large groups of people that there are statistical tactics for using normally problematic sample sizes to get representative results in the social sciences.

Basically, I have no faith in my ability or anyone's ability to have knowledge of what's good or bad for FFXI players as a whole. If somebody tried to make the point that almost all players hated leveling more than my racist uncle hates brown people, I would find that dubious as well.

It's cool that some people liked leveling at the slower pace. I'm glad somebody really liked it to balance out how much I hated it. I just find any implication of a "silent majority" to be very, very, very suspect and one or both sides always make that implication when this topic comes up.

You could say it's because the game's old, outdated graphics, what-have-you and that's the reason the game is 'dying'; But on the other hand, you could say that (Your sig is really distracting! haha) it's just as likely that the game changed in a few major ways (Abyssea/99 cap) that OG players weren't keen on and those facts are equally responsible in the decline of player numbers and re-subscribers.

It's a given to say that the game had aged by the time WoTG released, but it had aged gracefully. So much that when FFXIV released, many, many players migrated over expecting more great things from SE. Unfortunately we all know how that went, and you had (and still do) their players wanting to recapture the gameplay they had known for years only to realize that it was nowhere to be found.