EXP Parties as an option please!

Grab 1-7 friends. Goto an appropriate area for your level range (keep it tight), and accept battle leves. All of theme. Do the ones that you all have, turn it in accept everything again, wash rinse repeat. Crazy fast exp, with friends, in a grindy sort of way. This is a version of an exp party. Leve-chaining is really underestimated.

So what you were seeing in chat was not necessary more conversation, it was also macros.

I get that having a perfect SATA + Distortion + Magic Burst combo was beautiful and elegant in a way that XIV's individual weapon skills were not. Oddly enough, that kind of coordination rarely translated over to the {sky}/{sea} era endgame fights in XI, where maybe 2 people out of an 18 man alliance are the Chosen DDs who got to perform a weapon skill, the black mage is relegated to Blizzard IV constantly, and the THF was allowed to tag the monster once and then kicked out the alliance to make room for another healer.

4-man seal farming parties in Abyssea brought back some of that elegance, too. One THF/DNC tank or WAR/NIN, one WHM/RDM, one BLM/BRD, and one BLU/NIN or BLU/RDM if there was a WAR/NIN. Of course, the number of jobs THAT setup locked out was depressing, but it was brutally efficient and quite lovely to see in action.

There's a lot of fun stuff from FFXI that I would love to see translate over, but exp parties isn't on the list. Limbus/Dynamis, open world enemies that you run around because they can do worse than hit you with heavy, gear that remains relevant for years, convoluted maze zones where noobs get lost on the way to fighting big monsters, people committing suicide to get a tractor/raise rather than navigate through those maze zones...

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Originally Posted by Bluevann

http://cdn.guildwork.net/albums/imag...6e57d92eda.jpg

At the first times, I think it was uh... 2008, maybe? Not sure.. SE introduced Level Sync to try and ease that. And for a while, it did work well.

http://cdn.guildwork.net/albums/imag...6e57d92ee5.jpg

But alas, it was only a temporary bandaid.

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Nobody said "Looking for Group" in FFXI

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Originally Posted by Cutie_McSnuggles

Not to be rude, but to me this still sounds like a FATE party. It seems like you are looking for certain types of players rather then certain types of activities.

To clarify, I never got to play XI so I'm genuinely interested in what it is that makes EXP parties something different then what we have in the game. So far the only real difference I've seen anyone use is "People talked more". (I can't say this without sounding offensive, sorry about that.) It kinda makes FFXI sound like a really fancy chat room with a combat mini game for when people run out of things to say.

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To give an example of how it would work in XIV: The regular open world mobs would be similar strength to lets say trash in coil. To kill them you would need to form a balanced party that would stand still in certain places in the area (camps) near to a spot where a group of these mobs would be. Somebody in the party (usually with a ranged ability) would run and "pull" one of these mobs back to the party for them to kill and the puller would then drop off to pull the next mob before the previous one dies in order to speed up the process and create exp chains.

The main difference was that you all had to pay attention and play your class properly, otherwise it could end up in a wipe.

(Ahhh how I do miss the dangerous open world.)

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Originally Posted by Quesse

Nobody said "Looking for Group" in FFXI

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Those drawings (and their translation to English) were made by SE's artists themselves. I guess in japanese, it translates best as "LFG" than "LFP".

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Originally Posted by Cutie_McSnuggles

Not to be rude, but to me this still sounds like a FATE party. It seems like you are looking for certain types of players rather then certain types of activities.

To clarify, I never got to play XI so I'm genuinely interested in what it is that makes EXP parties something different then what we have in the game. So far the only real difference I've seen anyone use is "People talked more". (I can't say this without sounding offensive, sorry about that.) It kinda makes FFXI sound like a really fancy chat room with a combat mini game for when people run out of things to say.

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Absolutely no offense taken- I always appreciate a well thought out response.

It would be unfair and dismissive for me to say 'Well, you just should have been there.' ...nostalgia is always funny like that. I'll do my best to explain: It's very different from FATEs in that FATEs have very limited time limits and parameters, where as xp party levelling was very freeform and there were no game mechanics that introduced artificial time/area/level constraints. You were also accompanied by much smaller groups- there were no 24+ player group zerg hordes running from time limited event to time limited event.
Enemies were also much more threatening to lone adventurers. Most of the time currently, a single character can solo a large amount of a FATE all by her/himself. Back then, any more than two or three mobs(or just 1 in XI!) was a death sentence. You actually needed your group to survive in the world. That also helped knit the community together.
I know these things seem small compared to the sweeping changes even after 2.0 landed-the small differences I've detailed really changed the entire feel of early to mid game play.

Also, I agree with you completely that the playerbase I'm interacting with now is very different. I'm lucky enough, however, to have a great group of people within a linkshell that I'm a part of. It's modestly sized, but the people are close and we do most, if not all, new content together. If not for them, I admit that I'd have stopped playing long ago. It's strange to me that lots of people go through the entire game essentially solo by relying only on DF and PF. Why would people like that even bother with an MMO, I wonder?

It does sound like one of those, "you had to be there" type of things. My current opinion is it doesn't matter one way or the other if they put it in or not. But I'm not sure I'll ever really understand it. The way most people are describing XI in this thread it sounds like a terrible game that I'd hate. But I know I'm not getting the whole picture. It would be like me trying to explain to someone why I love Dark Souls so much if all they ever hear me talk about is those times I had 500K souls and got one shot by a boss and then fell off a cliff on the way to pick them back up.

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Originally Posted by Cutie_McSnuggles

It does sound like one of those, "you had to be there" type of things. My current opinion is it doesn't matter one way or the other if they put it in or not. But I'm not sure I'll ever really understand it. The way most people are describing XI in this thread it sounds like a terrible game that I'd hate. But I know I'm not getting the whole picture. It would be like me trying to explain to someone why I love Dark Souls so much if all they ever hear me talk about is those times I had 500K souls and got one shot by a boss and then fell off a cliff on the way to pick them back up.

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Oh, Dark Souls, the game that had me simultaneously throwing my controller and singing it's praises.... You've pretty much nailed it with the analogy- it's a lot like that, I think.

XI and XIV 1.0 were both slow, methodical games that required a ton of patience that more modern gamers wouldn't tolerate. However, the things I loved about them had nothing to do with their slow battle systems- I love the faster pace/feel of ARR combat! Just not the hordes of faceless, mute players piled on top of every wimpy, toothless, nil-threat mob in the game.

I agree with the OP and what Maikal is saying/asking. A lot of ffxiv feels like a solo game.

Nostalgia aside, FFXI, hate however much some ppl here obviously do, it got one thing right in its vanilla years and up to Abysses: it found ways to force strangers to build chemistry. You had to rely on other ppl, a progression linkshell was a big deal, and just something as simple a EXP parties played a large part in that euphoria.

Now, for ppl against this, the common disdain will be:

- this isn't ffxi <-(no shit sherlock: this also isn't WoW but SE obviously copied a lot from WoW)
- you can already do that in FFXIV: not really, what's being requested here is that open world be made a bit more dangerous (which tbh might actually happen in new 50+ zones), also the reason for the danger increase is due to making open world mobs tougher (ai,skill, and hp wise) and give more exp on death. This is one of many methods to get ppl travelling in groups (which the game does need IMHO)

Leves suck, dungeons got old because you always knew what to expect, and fates are just derp. <- these are just my opinions so don't waste your time flaming me for them, I won't care.