Party Size and Large Scale Content

So with the current party system being limited 8 players with no way of combining parties as FFXI had, and with the micro communities and the tiny linkshells this system encourages, will this end up becoming a major hindrance as the game gets flooded (trickled..?) with new players when the game goes live on PS3 and becomes pay to play?

In FFXI, the game was well on its way to encouraging low-man groupings before the advent of Abyssea. It still offers content that is fun and enjoyable to participate in with a full alliance (18 players) though.

Do we want the ability to join 2-3 parties to increase the maximum group size, and enjoyable, challenging content that encourages such groupings? I for one do, and I would like to get a feel for how the community in general feels about this.

Currently, with the inability to effectively administrate linkshells, the lack of a proper search function, the not-yet-completed mob and party mechanics that make grinding and grouping truly successful, the lack of true end-game content and the (for now) pitifully small server populations, there's no need and little desire for large groupings.

We used to have a large party system, but it was scrapped because the system just doesn't support large groupings in its current state. They were fun though, and for some events like Garlean Invasion and Behest that penalize players that aren't grouped together and/or have a small maximum number of participants, a party combining system system would go a long way for making the content more accessible and more fun.

There are a few threads that touched on this but they didn't really "take off" and pull in the number of views and responses necessary to provide an adequate overall picture of the community's views on the subject. That may partially be because I myself did not start those threads, and we all know how popular my threads are. So inb4 "why make another thread about it then?": Because my threads have a tendency to rock.. hard.

Here's a reference list of a couple similar threads I found by search tags "large scale content" and "dev1020":

party size and alliances (large scale content)
Party system changes. The maximum party size. (dev1020)

No drama in this thread please btw - I have plenty other threads for that; this is a healthy discussion thread. Let's keep the ridiculing, epeen, silly tags, b***hurt and other childishness to a dull roar. Random bolding provided tl;dr skimmers.

Quote:

Do we want the ability to join 2-3 parties to increase the maximum group size, and enjoyable, challenging content that encourages such groupings?

Having led a Dynamis and a Salvage LS, I know which kind of content I'm rooting for. (Hint: the one that isn't a freaking mess to manage, and the one where people aren't merely part of a gray mass plowing through monsters, but where a mistake of one idiot can ruin everything).

Campaign is okay.

I believe they said that a lot of this was on its way as level cap was increased to "Actual Endgame" proportions - but the only value in the timetable for that was "Way after we get out sh!t together."

I forget how large our parties used to be. like 15-16 ppl right?

15. In the famitsu article they talked about how alliance content would work. I took this to mean while it probably isn't coming in 1.19 or 1.2 that we will be hearing more about it pretty soon, and that at the very least alliance content has finally been confirmed.