Quote Originally Posted by Draylo View Post
So it was announced that the new Delve will be 6-18 man and an adjustment of HP accordingly, as noted here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...e-new-Delve-II

My question is, what incentive is there right now to have a fully functioning linkshell when there is nothing to do with them that requires it? Why would I want to have 18 people for the new Delve when it is POSSIBLE to beat it (I know it will be, or why would they have included that adjustment to do it with 6 people) when I can do it with 6 people? Why do I drag 18 people into this content when I can clear it faster with 6 people with secondary characters and not have to split the loot at all? The loot is the same regardless of players entering, what sense does this make!? If this is going to be just like the adjustment to the original delve, like was said in that post, the rewards system wont be like Divine Might. There is 0 incentive to bring an alliance.
With the implementation of item levels they had the perfect opportunity to differentiate between "Normal" and Heroic" difficulty modes or "Dungeons" (party) and "Raids" (Alliance). Yeah I'm using WoW terminology, because I can't bear to agree with you without also getting your goat, but I digress. They could have had 6-man delve drop gear in the 115-117 range and have 18-man drop all 118-120. That's probably not as big a gap as you might hope for, but it would differentiate the content without totally alienating small parties. The gear from the 6-man version would have to be of a caliber that would allow the participants to step up to the alliance version. You have to have some sort of progression between the two. I guess all that would have been too much work though.

I've seen this once before and it was with Abyssea. This caused a splinter in all linkshells and pretty much destroyed them. So then after Adoulin came out we were forced to once again gather people up to do the original Delve because it was balanced around 18 people. Then you had everyone quit for XIV and come crawling back because its boring and the people who still had a linkshell are penalized for it.
In my case I was in a shell where the leadership decided they would just 3-man everything for themselves and left the rest of us to our own devices with a lot of excuses. The ties of friendship and trust that were forged through the previous 18-man only content proved to be extremely weak, so I guess you do have to force people to tolerate each other. God forbid that people would be social and helpful in an MMO without being forced to do so. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” But it is what it is I suppose.