Let's have a round of applause for bringing grind parties front and center in FFXIV

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Originally Posted by Sypherblade

Am i way outta line here?

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Nope, you've just gotta drink less coffee. :p

I agree with you on besieged though, and campaign as well to a degree. People got hyped up for those scenarios, especially when they were new to it.

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Originally Posted by Verecund

Sadly, World of Warcraft and other MMOs/games did this little bit about a thousand times better with a feature called 'PvP'. (and to a somewhat lesser but still-apparent extent with "dungeons" and "raids")

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They've already said that FFXIV is a PvE game, and that all "PvP" content will come in the form of competitive PvE based events. You can't compare a predominantly PvE game to a game that readily hurls the PvP mechanic at people and expect to come back with decent parallels. Additionally, as someone who played WoW for a time and had planned to get into its competitive scene -- PvP is so ridiculously different from PvE, there are tons of different builds on either side and seldom do they completely overlap.

Raids are a different thing, and largely fall under the cover of "End game" even though some of them were lower level, typically because the higher level ones are the ones where a certain amount of skill is required, and in my experience with WoW raids -- people weren't very pleased to have to explain to you what you should be doing. Which takes me back to my earlier explanation of why end game content isn't a very good place to teach people how to play the game.

PvP sucks anyway.

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Originally Posted by Pyrix

PvP sucks anyway.

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Nope.

12345

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Nope.

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PvP is great in games that are designed around it -- NPCs and Players have to work similarly for it to work on PvE environments, though. FFXI and FFXIV are primarily PvE games, which makes it a lot higher to develop solid PvP mechanics.

In my opinion, there's no way to program good 1v1 PvP in any MMO, though.

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Sounds like MMO is the wrong genre for you....

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Sounds like your idea of an MMO is not the genre for me.

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Taken completely out of context, but consolidates most of the 7-8 pages prior. Not at all aimed at the authors, but I think they'd agree that harping about an ideal MMO is all that really came out of the past 8 pages. Which, in my mind, is completely relative. But that's what we're here for, right? Anyway these struck out at me.

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Party grinding isn't about killing the same mob over and over again in the same place, its about learning the class you're playing, and learning strategies to do with others.

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Exactly. And let's be clear, that isn't just a universal attribute for MMOs-- the degree of teamwork vary from title to title. Square carries the flagship for the most demanding player collaboration and innovation amongst their MMO brethren. That is the SquareEnix MMO signature. A high degree of player-to-player reliance, teamwork and strategy. Slow, calculated battles. And no twitch reflexes that so many westerners identify as the cornerstone of modern gaming. Square's right, there's nothing modern about that. What you get is players limited in their capacity by hardware, internet connection, server lag and just dumb luck. That's not to say you don't need to think fast and react accordingly, but only if your team doesn't perform perfectly together. The staple of a SquareEnix MMO: a unit working together perfectly in unison, covering one another when one begins to lag behind and lightening the load when stress falls too hard on another. Its very zen. You know it is a Japanese game.

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Man, I really wish people would stop saying that grind parties promote skillful play. There was nothing demanding about FFXI's grind parties. All you needed was the right items, right job, and following a guide someone posted on Campistarus. All of the mobs picked for grinding were the least dangerous mobs, in the least dangerous camps. TP skills were spammed at will, (in its prime, they weren't) few people used utility/enfeeble spells, and people stocked up on bard, red mages, and other buffing classes so that they wouldn't have to deal with MP management and whatever.

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Completely circumstantial to when you played. Also...

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Not many things in XI involved skill in general. Almost ever fight was tank and spank, kite, or melee burn. All came down to paying attention. Like you said soloing was one of the things that required something extra. That and properly playing an endgame whitemage.

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Pretending this is the FFXI boards... lol. But all right. It took more innovation for a player to solo. But beforehand, who figured out what those right items and jobs were for grinding? Who contributed Campistarus? Who experimented for months with food effects, gear combination, and mob selection before writing a guide? Who cataloged the crafting recipes, turned hate management into a science, and started the actual endgame battle strategies that were so simple? SquareEnix did that for you?

Oh yes, the players from 2002-2003 made it easy for everyone. Maybe they shouldn't have written those guides, or recommend anyone where to level and what to wear? Is that really the intelligent take-away here? It took no skill because it all was catch-up to the guys that leveled before you? There were plenty of times when you could level off the norm, don't pretend Square didn't offer it to you. People simply didn't want to spend their time doing so when they knew they could be more efficient with their time by just trying again tomorrow for another good party. The art was in the planning, experimentation, preparation, practice, leadership and social skills with other players. And that takes more skill than strafing, bunny-hopping, and all those other skillz online gods possess.

It's easy to forget that 9 years is a long, long time in Gaming years. In in its conception it took every ounce of skill, collaboration and creativity available in the MMO gamer sphere to advance through XI. Of course, looking back nine years later, it doesn't seem like a lot of it was ever needed. But that just goes to show how MMOs do age in time. But let's not cut it short in the one area it really shined upon: making everything as absolutely as difficult as possible.

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Originally Posted by ViolentDjango

... All MMOs have a learning curve ... steamrolling through to Rank 50 won't teach you that. That's why grinding is a good thing, just like in FFXI, FFXIV is shaping into a game where timing and watching for cues are a vital element of effective play and you can't reasonably expect someone to learn all of that if they can hop to max level in a week.

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My thought has always been job and battle mechanics needed to be priority 1. Until then we're all assuming there will actually be tactical, long battles. I agree a form of grinding mixed with story elements (like a Besieged) would be a wonderful fit. But the battle plans has to be flushed out before we can assume how dynamic large battles can be. Although we can't really assume anything until we see more of the new battle scheme. Anyways, the biggest drive to out-perform the competition (other players) is the desire for recognition as being a great tank, healer, DDer, or party leader, so on. Without that basic feral drive, everything seems pointless in this open sandbox. (So Jobs, hurry up!)

Like they just said above, it is a PvE game. As I attempted to state before, there's a much deeper connection Square wants players to share with one another. It's certainly not "I keel you!"

edit: Whoa what a wall...

Commonly forgot fact of MMO..

People LIKE party grinding.

They don't want a game to revolve around it and they certainly don't want to HAVE to do it. But in the end if you wanna hang out with some friend or meet some new people the Number One Very Best Way to do it is grind on some Mobs. You can complain about it all you want, but it has, should and always will be a major part of MMOs because there is nothing more annoying than waiting for someone else to pick up a quest so you can get some XP.

Yes agreed, I do enjoying grinding as another component of game play. Why does everything people post here, have a troll-type personality to it. Just try once to enjoy one thing about the game.

Why is it the only thing that makes people happy is their own self-pity and misery?

Just try once to find something you do like, I promise for some that will be harder than it will be to level to 50 solo.

In the meantime I will grind and enjoy it.

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Originally Posted by RedHare

edit: Whoa what a wall...

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That is quite the wall, but I liked what you said about "skill." Too many people think skill = twitch and ignore strategy, experimentation, data collection, teamwork, and just good old knowledge and research. All of those are also skills, and they all separate good players from worse ones just as much as reflexes do in an FPS.

Also right about the time period in which people are referring to FFXI. Those saying it was skillful are talking about how it was in like 2004, where most of the information was spread by word of mouth and you still had to use party-based mechanics like careful hate control, setting up Sneak Attack/Trick Attack, and performing skillchains and magic bursts. The best guides English players had were reading mysterytour (bless that guy for providing something) where they had to decipher directly translated stuff like "it checks it ??? and is put into hand." The people talking about how the only skill in the game was knowing what equipment to wear are talking about how the game was much later, like in 2008, when everyone spammed TP attacks with pre-made macros that swapped out everything you wore for you.

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Originally Posted by Murugan

No one is arguing against options, you are simply trying to get them to kill the community by removing the benefit of grouping. Give solo players other options, hell give other options to groups again but party grinding with XP chains must be #1, because nothing else in any other MMO that has ever been developed has compared to it.

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Was I advocating the removal of benefits to grouping? How so?

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Originally Posted by Chocobits

I usually agree with you Neptune but I'm actually in favor of grind parties being added. "It takes all kinds" as they say. I like having a variety of options for leveling up.

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I'm cool with them being more possible as well, since a lot of people have fun with it. It just looks bad for this game to be copying such old school games in 2011 without offering anything new.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino

You need to try looking at this from a different perspective. You are seeing it as "this is what WoW and other semi-popular MMOs have done and so it's what FFXIV needs to do to compete with those games," but that is probably a flawed assumption.

Consider that this game already launched in such a poor state every casual gamer has pretty much given up on it. Not many of them will be likely to return ever. People gave it one chance, they didn't like it, and they left for good. Back to WoW or off to RIFT or whatever. FFXIV is so far behind these games in terms of content the developers would need to work twice as fast just to catch up. But would simply "catching up" cause any of those people left with a bad taste in their mouths to return? No, because they're already just as content playing something else. At this point in time, FFXIV cannot possibly hope to beat WoW at its own game. Even if they add solo quest grinding instead of improving party camp grinding, why should WoW-types return for something their game had years ago?

On the other hand, look at players past and present of FFXI. The game is over nine years old and still supports the PS2. The updates have slowed to a crawl and no truly new areas or expansive content additions have been made in years. Many players were upset by the changes made with the add-ons, the level cap increase, and the slow updates in Altana expansion content. The number of world server systems has been reduced by half, and the game is in its twilight. Those people have nowhere to turn, because all other modern MMOs have tried to copy WoW (RIFT is practically a carbon copy in a large number of areas) to try and capture some of its success. There is a large number of people who are in the market for a serious grind game with a monthly subscription fee, hardcore accomplishments most players wouldn't dream of doing more than once, party grinding, and, well, the Final Fantasy brand and icons. There are also some minor things that would help out here, like the fact that FFXI players would be more likely to even hear news of XIV being better in the first place.

What's more likely, that they can grab a few hundred thousand subscriptions from the modern MMO market flooded with similar games, or from a market where the most recent game catering toward it was made nine years ago? I think it's the latter.

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This is a good post. First, the assumption is only as flawed as that method is for attracting attention from gamers willing to purchase the game and support it. In that case its only flaw is that it doesn't innovate.

When you say a large number of people support FFXI, let's take a look at that concept. A lot of those people can't run this game but they could maybe get on the PS3 version. If they all played FFXIV it might be enough to perpetuate this game. I've always seen it as a problem for FFXIV to develop into a niche title like FFXI. You say large, but we are talking about less than 100K people. I believe FFXIV can have broader appeal.. part of that is appealing to FFXI players, the rest to the mass market. They still have a chance but I really believe counting on FFXI players will be throwing that chance away. It sounds like a big risk. Those FFXI players will probably never quit FFXI.

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Originally Posted by Arcell

I enjoy the quests too but 30,000 SP? That's about 1/3 of the SP required to hit 49 or 50. By that logic you should be able to hit those levels by doing a three quests in a short portion of your day.

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I should have known someone would start quoting me on this out of context. 30k SP is about what I've been hearing you get out of 1 hour of grinding in a party. So yeah, it should be about equal. The reward for time is what should be equal. It isn't about a certain number.

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Originally Posted by Akashi

I left FFXI for a reason.. I don't want to go back to it! FFXIV can be unique without having to resort to FFXI's tired methods, the foremost of which is the party grind. The inability to do anything efficiently by oneself (especially leveling up) is a big turn off for a lot of people, including myself.

I'm all for group content, but not when it is the only viable way to progress your character.

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I agree.

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Originally Posted by Chain

This game is hanging onto too much of the past.

Loading screens between zones.. still?


Convoluted mechanics like the gate to the boat docks and having to click a menu to stand up after using /sit. (Small I know, but stuff like this makes the game feel like its limping on old technology)

Game still feels clunky and awkward (slightly less since the removal of the stamina bar) why on earth does this game feel so sluggish? Makes XI feel like hack and slash.

These things scare me more than the amount of dungeons they slap into the game or if they add a search feature.

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I'm glad someone pointed this out.. let's not let the dev team forget about small issues like this before they attempt to relaunch the game.

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Originally Posted by Galoot

I like grinding parties... It promotes skillful play and also gets people adjusted to new skills and responsibilities in PTs.

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I think this is just a myth people think up to justify the mindless grind and time commitment. I'll explain why below.

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Originally Posted by Chain

It's like watching a sports team lose 10 games in a row but still go out fighting each day only to get stomped on.

In turn I offer them my condolences and a friendly hug. I hope the next mmo they are talking about is approached from a different angle, looking at modern game engines and scrapping the love affair with console based UIs.

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It is sad.. I wonder what can be done about it.

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Originally Posted by Forerunner

So we can have r50 Tanks who can't tank, and r50 healers who can't heal? Good job.

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Yeah, oh wait, why can't people beat the Ogre? Because they learned all those great skills partying to 50? Myths dude. You only learn how to tank and heal by educating yourself or having a good leader.

In FFXI there are plenty of people who accuse other capped players of being bad players, and that's in a game where it's impossible to solo. So there's your evidence that you don't know what you're talking about.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

From experience it's more than the leveling curve that produces bad tanks, dps, and heals. Really, becoming actually good at doing a specific role has usually taken research outside of the game and practice.

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Exactly.

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Originally Posted by SuzakuCMX

Do you ever stop QQing? How have you not died from dehydration yet? It's simply amazing.

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Crying is something you do when you can't change something.. the fact that you feel this way about the game makes me feel bad for you. Why do you accept this game as it is? That really calls into question your self-worth! Come on man, at least stand up for yourself; take a little pride in what you do, and try to do your part to make this a better game while we have the opportunity.

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Originally Posted by Raim

So basically, everyone is under the impression that WoW invented dungeons, raids, and questing, and that any game that includes these is a WoW clone. How tragic.

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Exactly.. and people are still under the impression that FFXI invented anything, when in fact it desperately stole from other games to form its identity, leaving behind the rich material of its forebears.

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Originally Posted by Murugan

This is what Neptune, Tonymontana, Gifforce, and several others want the game to be. A similar WoW clone.

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I don't want that, any neither does giftforce of all people. You are just scared of our suggestions. All I did was say quests should award higher rewards and that equates to a WoW clone? Are you a little quick at the trigger there mate? haha

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Originally Posted by Tsukino

Progression through the game (leveling) by way of a large number of solo quests based on a few archetypes is exactly what WoW brought to the MMO world, and that is what the OP is suggesting FFXIV do now.

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Negative.. although I wouldn't have a problem with that. I wouldn't make that suggestion because I don't think it's creative enough.

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Originally Posted by Pyrix

..a shitty game idea in a forum post in his signature.

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The irony here.. in effect you just criticized yourself more than I ever could.