The Discrimination Factor of Solo/party to Casual/Hardcore respectively.

Hello FFXIV players,

-The concept
After reading through countless post on the forums about how solo play and content is great for the casual player and how partying up and playing with your friends is generally for hardcore players who have more time to spend, I find myself confused to the concept. I have played countless MMOS and argumentatively speaking I think it is absurd to say that party play/ hardcore content is and should be reserved for people with a lot of time to play the game. Although there is some truth to this as in FFXI you were generally in a party for at least 2hours, since it could be time consuming to find and create one, but that is where FFXIV should be different as it can incorporate new ideas. So hear me out!

---The Understanding
A prime example of this which many of you will crucify me for bringing this up is: World of warcraft's dungeon finder system. For any of you who have played WOW you would know that the dungeon system is a great way for even casual players to find other people to join up with and play with for a casual or hardcore amount of time.
How it works is that you open up the dungeon finder menu and you queue up and within seconds or a few minutes, you’re automatically partied up and teleported to a dungeon with you’re randomly found party members.
This concept in no way can be disqualified as casual or hardcore play. It's both one and the second at the same time. I believe the statement of a casual player and a hardcore player should not be THE METHOD in which they play BUT the time in which they have to play.
The methods should be the same, but the repetitions of such method would be based on the time you have.

---Conclusion
I bring this all up because, I am hoping maybe a Dev will read this and be inspired by it, and secondly I think it is a bad direction to separate the game into two (Solo and Hardcore player content). Rather the game should be morphed on accessibility for both to play and enjoy the same content, and the only separating factor should be the time you’re willing to spend on such things. As currently my understanding is that the game will be divided in two, casual and hardcore.

Note: In no way am I saying that Final Fantasy XIV should be more like WOW or any other game. I play FFxiv because it is unique. I am merely trying to bring up a valid point that I believe many of the Devs and people of the MMO communities are misunderstanding. After all there are two types of definitions. Concrete and abstract, and in no way can this be defined as a concrete thing, thus the definition is for interpretation.

Thank you for reading.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Masaiyan

A prime example of this which many of you will crucify me for bringing this up is: World of warcraft's dungeon finder system. For any of you who have played WOW you would know that the dungeon system is a great way for even casual players to find other people to join up with and play with for a casual or hardcore amount of time.
How it works is that you open up the dungeon finder menu and you queue up and within seconds or a few minutes, you’re automatically partied up and teleported to a dungeon with you’re randomly found party members.

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I believe your suggestion to implement a similar dungeon finder system is an excellent one. Blizzard did a great job of clearing that hurdle and burden for enjoying group/party content. It was a great way to be introduced to new players and find good dungeon-clearing friends. Everyone from hardcore to casual players made great use of it and now it's rare to see people spamming chat to try to manually put together a group unless it's for a very particular reason like trying to earn a particularly difficult achievement.

If you're unfamiliar with the dungeon finder system, here's how it works
1) You open the dungeon finder window with a key or clicking on a button
2) You specify what role(s) you can fill (tank, healer, dps). The feature remembers your selection.
3) You can simply click 'Queue' to let the system determine what dungeons you qualify for and assemble a group for you -or- you can specify a particular dungeon you're interested in.

At this point, you can go about your business do quests, organizing your inventory or participating in the economy while a group gets assembled. The length of the wait often depends on the demand for each role. For example, tanks often have very short wait times while dps has to wait longer.

When your group has been assembled and ready to go, all players are notified. If you click accept, you get instantly ported to the dungeon entrance. If you forgot something, you can use the interface to return yourself back to where you were to grab something out of the bank or whatever. Then you can use the interface to port back into the instanced dungeon. After you've completed the instanced dungeon, you are ported back to the exact spot you were standing before, allowing you to continue doing whatever else you were doing.

As well if a party member left the group, it was incredibly easy to bounce back as the party leader would be immediately prompted to re-queue the party and moments later a new member would be teleported to the groups location and without delay your ready to go again.

I strongly believe all MMOS now days should implement a similar system. It makes party play accessible to casual players. After all MMO's are online for you to play and interact with others :)

Oh please... Dont make it a boring game like WoW... You get to lvl 500 in a week.
Go find it yourself lol.. No need to make everything easy like they do in Wow.. I mùean easy lvling easy kids graphics... Wow just sucks ass and come to think they only created 3 games and think they own the world.

The issue with WOW is that there isn't much of a difference between casual and hardcore except the players who play the casual content for hours compared to the players who play the same casual content for 1 hour. This is why I find your argument to be flawed.

I do think that having leve-timers and only being able to do a certain amount a day is a factor in this though, and should either be expanded to over 8 per day or have the limit removed entirely.