What to do with EXP now..?

[svengalis]

Any idiot can farm currency as well, why reward one form of derp and not another?

I think the whole point of his post was that it is too easy to get exp for the rewards TC is asking. You don't even have to be at the keyboard to get exp.

[Zhronne]

But why do these people need a reason to exp in the first place?

The other people? No clue.
I can talk about me. I'd love XP to keep going, at least to a minimum degree, for three main reasons:

1) Because I like it! It's fun! What I hated at lv75 about xp is mostly it took too much time to get a pt and often it sucked, not too count it took way too much grinding to get what you wanted and I didn't have that sort of patience/time
2) Because other people still need it, and the less people look for xp, the harder it is for those who still do to find/assemble a pt. Giving people more reasons to keep doing xp (which is different from FORCING THEM to do it, which I wouldn't want) keeps the cycle going.
3) Because XP was one of the core elements around which old FFXI was based. Game changed and it's ok, but it would be cool if XP could keep a guaranteed spot in nowadays's game balance, even if much smaller than the one it used to have.

That's it.

[Zhronne]

I think the whole point of his post was that it is too easy to get exp for the rewards TC is asking. You don't even have to be at the keyboard to get exp.

You don't have to be at the keyboard to fish Hakuryus in beaucedine and then sell them to buy currency, either.

Altough I agree that while AFK xping was fun at the beginning, it became kinda retarded. Wish they "fixed" it when they still could.
What kills XP pts in my own view is the lack of variety.
It's doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over that kills the fun.
Back then it was weapon chains in sky, then stuff in lufaise, then colibri pts etc. Now it's all about semi-afk alliances in Abyssea, which was fun at the beginning because it was something completely new and never seen before, but it's boring now, by my standards.
If people still had a choice and could REALISTICALLY* swap between all these options and keep XP fun, doing at their own pace.



*in THEORY you still have this choice, an XP outside of Abyssea it's not too bad. A good PT can get more XP than an ugly abyssea alliance (been in some of those...). But that's THEORY, when we talk about REALITY then nobody does that, which means you can't do it either even if you have the choice. The few times I've seen people shout for old style pts (or the times I did myself) only nabs answer, and the final thing becomes frustrating instead than entertaining.

One could argue "if you have fun doing it, then keep doing it even if you get no reward for it" and no, sorry, it doesn't work like that.
It's both thins at the same time, it's fun ALSO because I get something out of it and I feel my character growing. Doing it without any purpose at all, no thanks. But that goes for almost anything else in this game, for me. It's not the same for everybody I suppose, but it's how things work for me.

[Caketime]

I think the whole point of his post was that it is too easy to get exp for the rewards TC is asking. You don't even have to be at the keyboard to get exp.

My point is that both methods are incredibly easy, where one method involves sitting in an FC alliance and the other involves spamming JA to make the coins pop out of the beasties' corpses. In Dyna you barely have to pay attention, just press buttons and watch for the color flash, then pull something else when the target dies. The only real difference between the two is that one requires you to at least press some buttons, higher brain functions aren't required and there's no player skill involved for either.

[Thegreatmonkey]

While I do like this idea, I think it should be something that we can get BC,KC,HKC,etc seals, or turn get more IS, CP, etc. If there are items to be gotten, it should be something that we can pick what stats we want to put on it and or enhance them.

[scaevola]

Man, forget a merit point shop. Give me the Vampire Black Market from Wild Arms V where you buy stuff with straight-up experience levels.

Two rules:

1) You cannot "bank" levels. Anything you buy will be extracted from your current job's levels at the moment of purchase.

2) You can buy up to as many things as you have levels for at that moment (e.g. 9 10-level items, 3 30-level items, 1 98-level super item, etc.) but you must be on a level 99 job to initiate the transaction, to avoid gaming it with low-level jobs.

There are a TON of things you could do with this.

[WolfMoonstrike]

The other people? No clue.
I can talk about me. I'd love XP to keep going, at least to a minimum degree, for three main reasons:

1) Because I like it! It's fun! What I hated at lv75 about xp is mostly it took too much time to get a pt and often it sucked, not too count it took way too much grinding to get what you wanted and I didn't have that sort of patience/time
2) Because other people still need it, and the less people look for xp, the harder it is for those who still do to find/assemble a pt. Giving people more reasons to keep doing xp (which is different from FORCING THEM to do it, which I wouldn't want) keeps the cycle going.
3) Because XP was one of the core elements around which old FFXI was based. Game changed and it's ok, but it would be cool if XP could keep a guaranteed spot in nowadays's game balance, even if much smaller than the one it used to have.

That's it.

This is actually a pretty good argument for why it's a good idea to have something to spend exp on. I would hate for exp parties to go the way of CoP(before level cap removal) and other events no one plays because they already have the rewards.

While the majority of the player-base doesn't have max merits on every job, it is only inevitable that more people everyday will. At some point (possibly years down the road, possibly sooner) most people will have max merits on all jobs and stop exping, leaving the people who haven't to be SoL.

[Alhanelem]

3) Because XP was one of the core elements around which old FFXI was based.

That's only because old FFXI had nothing else to do but level up and do the missions. There was no real endgame when the game was new other than dynamis, which drained a lot of most ppl's exp so they always needed more.

There is so many options for what to do now that I don't EXP unless I really want to because it just means less opportunities to get into groups for other content.

[Zhronne]

That's only because old FFXI had nothing else to do but level up and do the missions.

If you ask me I think that's quite a wrong statement.
You talk about dynamis but before they finished adding all Dyna areas there were many other things to do other than XP. Ground kings, many other NMs, Sky nms, gathering, crafting, Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Ballista, BC battles etc etc.
Now we could argue the utility of some of these content, but nonetheless you had a lot of stuff to do other than XP.
Any way that's not the whole point of the issue, let's leave this aside for a moment.

People weren't doing XP because it was the only thing they could do, people were doing XP for other reasons:

• Game was still new, very few people had capped levels and subjobs, majority of people had only one job at 75, also when they added merits that put another big chunk of xp to gather for all players. XP was slow and it took a lot to level up. Basically people kept doing XP because they *needed* it.
• People died, and dying back then mattered, and sometimes you really died a lot and also if I recall the penalties were bigger and you recovered less XP with Raise 1. People used to delevel to 74 all the time
• Can already guess from the earlier point, but one of the big reasons of why people kept XP, it's because SE designed a game where they imagined XP as a constant and never ending cycle. You capped a job? Ok no problem, you will want to xp another job. A patch changing something with lv 1-37 abilities and spells will make you want to level a new subjob, and so on. Why? It's simple. Back then to make XP you *needed* a party, to make so people could always assemble pts, they arranged game balance so that people would always want to keep doing xp. As long as people have reasons to keep doing XP there will be people looking for pt. As long as there is people looking for a pt, there will be people who won't get frustrated and will be able to do xp. It was an "endless cycle" of new jobs, new subjobs and new/returning players. It worked for quite a few years, of course with time it started to slow down, and Abyssea's >300k/hr afk XP alliances destroyed it all of course

These are the main reasons.
I'm not fool enough to ask for the current situation to go back to how it was @75 lol, I'd be crazy.
But at the same time I don't want to see XP completely gone from the game. Make it have a smaller place, make it so people will have less reasons to do it, but please give us a reason!
If they don't want to remove merit caps, then adding something to convert excess merits/XP could give people who still want to do xp from time to time a small motivation to keep doin it, while also keeping the "legacy" of FFXI alive at the same time.

Doesn't seem too bad to me, and doesn't seem a "small" thing like some of those suggested in this thread would make everybody else (those who don't want to XP ever ever ever again) feel "forced" to do XP.

[Umichi]

Let us feed merit points to the mystery box goblins!

your idea is gold