Ok, I would like to know where did Yoshi get those informations from, because as far as I know every MMO, even the latest, have some kind of large scale content.Quote:
Once parties are limited to a max of 8 players, any thoughts on an alliance system that will allow multiple parties to join up together as one large party to take on really big mobs?
In the past the communities that were playing each game were a lot bigger, and so you could have a lot of people there. And now that the community sizes are smaller, we want to concentrate a little bit more on smaller party sizes, and so starting off with regular content that you can do with 4 players--making that our base. Then making bigger type of battles that you need to think about, "Ok how are we going to defeat this," and make that the 8-player party.
The 8-player party is currently what you would think of as an 'Alliance' with normal parties being 4. Then once we have enough content to support that, we'll start considering adding content that requires more players. Right now it's 4 and 8, that's what we're aiming for.
I want to point out that IMHO the decreased party size is a great thing, it makes the whole game more balanced, and a little challenging, actually when I first played the game in CP and saw the 15 parties I thought it was built that way just to make the players free to make their own "optimal size" that could have been 6/7/8 for ranking up and 13/14/15 for endgame and thought it was a great thing since you weren't bounded anymore to find the last member to reach a full party in order to start doing things... but it didn't turn out this way :D
Still I find this answer from Yoshi-P a bit disappointing. I love the fact that there will be contents for 4 ppl parties, wich I expect to be a lot challenging and that will make every player emerge for its role. Also an end game based on 8 ppl parties is great, they're not too much and they don't require a lot of time to build up a party. But still I hope the idea of alliances and large scale contents won't be scrapped at all, because people really enjoy them, and a lot of players that didn't read this interview are looking forward for them and are confident that there will be some kind of large scale content sooner or later.
I think Yoshida should consider both ways, most of the contents based on light and full parties, but also a few large scale battles.