My New Player Experience

[Alhanelem]

Plus Viera, I'm very very happy I'm going to be a Viera,I wish for males though

I wish people would stop projecting human sexuality and gender logic onto fantasy races. They are made up fantasy beings, they can be designed however they want. And that's why you get several to choose from. If you don't like the design of one, there's others available. When FFXIV originally cmae out, they shoehorned a female gender into the roegadyn (the galka spiritual successor) and... almost nobody uses it. That was sure some dev time well spent.

Personally I'm thankful that keeping to the lore of the Viera enabled them to create a more beastly type of race, something I've been wishing for for ages. I play a human in real life, I actually want to avoid them in fantasy games where I can.

[Zehira]

That was sure some dev time well spent.

True, so true. I fear if FFXI was remade then this community would end up like FFXIV's.

We are already perma-banned from FFXIV's offical forums not so long after FFXIV:ARR released.

(Couldn't put "political correctness" reasons on here even if you knew Facebook dramas then it is the same thing over there)

[Alhanelem]

Let's be honest, you mentioned "continue with the same group/party" which sounds like a feedback from the minority.

What's this supposed to mean? I don't think I'm in a minority when I say that I'd like to do more things with friendly people or those who were otherwise good to play with. You make it sound like the very idea of meeting somebody you like enough to do more than one thing with is some kind of wild and crazy fantasy. Now, I don't have data on that I admit, but it really doesn't seem out of the realm of normalness.

You keep using "majority" and "minority" without any actual data. Best that you stop using those words before you make more of a fool out of yourself unless you go collect some data ffirst, or at least state it clearly as an opinion or hypothesis, rather than suggesting it to be factual.

Not to mention that FFXI already has instanced battle areas.

In most cases, they're only "instanced" in the loosest form of the word, where there are simply a set number of cloned battle areas within a zone (why the game calls them "layer areas") and if they're all occupied, you have to wait, whereas real instances don't have a set limit for any specific content (rather just a technical limit for total number of instances for all content that the server can handle at once)

But I'm not even specifically discussing instances or instanced content. I'm just talking about opening a window with a list of contents that you can pick from and be paired with people who want to do the same thing easily. Really more like FFXIV's Party Finder rather than the Duty Finder; and then when you have a party you're satisfied with, you do the content. Right now the only worthwhile thing available to you for that in FFXI is /yell but that only reaches certain areas, and the other person or people that might be interested in what you're doing could easily be somewhere else.

[Seriha]

I'll give a pretty simple example of how expanding group finding tools would be benefit: You want to build an Almace.


We'll skip past all the early stuff and jump straight to Abyssea content. While soloing the three phases is possible now between the level cap increases/ilvl and trusts, the truth is that doing it on your own with a singular account is a painfully slow process. If you want to target the widest array of KI procs, you're further limited to pretty much WAR or NIN. 2 of the 3 phases also included timed NMs (Gukumatz and Sisyphus), and while the latter can be worked around with gold chest drops, that's still RNG and you can only hold one.


Now, the benefit of grouping here is that it would cut the required time significantly, to the point I'd probably say it'd be 90% faster getting 75 Apa horns with a legit party of 6 than doing it on your own. If your thought is, "Why would anyone want to help with that, though?" then we're more or less talking about my post's last point about people helping and self-interest. Still, it'd be nice to have the option to be actively out farming such on your own and having the group slowly build as people take interest. It would make the experience far better than just continuing to slog solo or hoping maybe you find a helper or two doing a shout/yell before leaving to the zones. Some may join up to kill time. Some may seek reciprocation/alternate drops. Others may acknowledge that, yeah, the process sucks, so a little good deed here and there won't hurt the community.


In the end, it doesn't matter if you're in the most awesomest, bestest linkshell community/discord catering to a very specific server. You're not in arm's reach of everyone. Very few are actually "like you" if this whole charitable visage isn't an act. And that's my overall point. There are and have been people who fall through the cracks, and the more that happens, the more they get mad at the game, the more likely they'll want to stop playing, and eventually telling other people to not play because of their bad experiences. Arguing against steps to alleviate that outcome will never make sense to me, and at worst, comes off as the worst form of fanboyism given the fingerpointing to XIV and how doing anything like it would be catastrophic.