Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Eyeballed]

And I'm not contesting it. I already acknowledged that all of this comes down to a matter of opinion, and sadly you're entitled to your own. What I'm explaining to you is why your idea would be hurtful to a majority of the playerbase, and that SE knows that and that that's why it will never happen. Do you think they didn't foresee what was going to happen? Why do you think they did it in the first place?

Honestly my contempt comes not from XI in its current state anymore. I couldn't care less and am not even sure why my account is still active. The flames are fueled by the apparent new trend in all MMO's that mirror what has happened to this game. And what's happening to 99% of new MMO's? Aw screw it, let's be honest: Nobody's made a great MMO in a decade or more. Care to figure out why?, I do; Hell, I fucking love playing the genre, and I know what I loved most about playing them. Now name me some of the major changes that FFXI has undergone in the past few years and we'll see if we can deduce why the active playerbase continues to bleed out.

My contention is, "Easy come, easy go".

And I'm not contesting it. I already acknowledged that all of this comes down to a matter of opinion, and sadly you're entitled to your own. What I'm explaining to you is why your idea would be hurtful to a majority of the playerbase, and that SE knows that and that that's why it will never happen. Do you think they didn't foresee what was going to happen? Why do you think they did it in the first place?

And who cares if it hurts the playerbase, right? I mean, you would have been on the indifferent side of this argument 5 years ago it seems. Again, what playerbase is there really left to offend?

I loved the game, I just hated EXP. Remember, I actually did everything else the game has to offer, something you repeatedly seem to forget even exists. EXP is so minor compared to everything else that exists that this entire debate is pretty pointless.

I didn't forget about the rest of the game. The rest of the game is not the issue here.

That didn't help at all, skipper. The problem you're not getting is that there were periods of days of no invites in your level range appeared. I've been there and I tried building parties and even that failed sometimes. It wasn't until Level Sync was introduced that it was remedied somewhat (aside from the fact that higher levels still didn't wanna do much with lower levels). And if a PUP invited people to a party, they wouldn't even bother to respond unless they already had five other people. You're completely delusional if you think it was always that easy. THF and MNK were both desired in parties, and still there were periods during which people just weren't around, or not a decent number of people, so 8 people were lfp but only six could party, so two had to sit out, and of course it would always hit the same jobs over and over again. The old EXP system was so horribly flawed in a myriad of ways that I can't possibly understand why anyone would want it back.

I never (read: almost never) took an invite from another leader for EXP and roughly 85% of the time I could start a group any old time I felt like it. And not some trash I threw together just so I could say we got mobilized, if anything. Level Sync just put the icing on the cake for a leader trying to form a group. I'll say it till I'm blue in the face: If you couldn't get an invite it wasn't because you weren't on RDM or BRD - it was because you were too damn lazy to do anything but sit back and complain that the game didn't fix your problems for you.