Lately after reading a few of the 'FFXI vets please respond' threads, I thought back to my close to 7 years with FFXI on the Shiva server, starting at NA launch and ending when level cap was 90 and Abyssea was the 'endgame'. I often, actually I always, miss the community aspect of FFXI. The game had tons and tons of flaws, but it nailed the feeling of being a part of a 'server community' in a way FF14 never can.
I think that having a cross server (datacenter) duty finder and party finder is what makes FF14 less of a community based game than FFXI. In FFXI, I remember forming parties at the dunes outpost or gate to Selbina, finding a potential party member who maybe needed help getting to us at our camp spot, and then perhaps even having to jump on a higher level job after changing in Selbina to help run them through La Thiene or something, past trains of gobs at the Dunes entrance and such (back before they got rid of training of mobs).
In FFXI, people you met in a party you may and probably would see again. Even others in other parties around your own you could meet and eventually maybe party up with and play together. That WHM you met in Garlaige you may meet again in Sky or Abyssea, and may eventually become a part of your LS or static. That elitist who constantly griefs others would soon get a name for themselves and find they either need to clean up their act or start a new character since reputation actually mattered. These and many more aspects of 'community' are lost when there is a cross world duty finder that allows for pretty much total anonymity because, as is often said here 'you'll probably never see that person again' so you can act any way you like. Others in your parties become virtual NPCs with 'hey healer' or 'hey sam' replacing peoples' character names, etc. -- I understand this is the way it is, and I'm not saying it is good or bad since people may prefer it this way -- but I do think it is what makes trying to build a community in FF14 a lot harder than in FFXI
Of course, people have their FCs and LSs that allow them to interact with those they like and/or have found compatible. These are both great! However, I just miss the sense of server community that feels as though is hard to find in any MMO at all these days, not only FF14 but WoW and others, too. In a way, I kind of wish we still had specific server only duty finders and all but I know queues may take forever, then, and that the cross server DF and PF is an amazing QoL improvement. Just nostalgic, I guess ^_^v Thoughts?
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06-30-2018, 05:30 AMMirielleLavandreLack of 'server community' in FFXIV - a nostalgic perspective
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06-30-2018, 05:35 AMDrWho2010
I find you only get out of it what you put into it. I find the hunt community quite close knit and i often run into the same people all the time doing an A/S rank, and around in the Gold Saucer. I'm quite a flirty person so I meet a lot of people that way too. Also if you're good at what you do people will come to you, not the other way round.
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06-30-2018, 05:56 AMGurney
I was on Garuda when I first started playing 11. Yes the server community was so different. Sitting in Jeuno watching shouts for different parties, or asking for a Tele, D2, or Retrace. The social LS I was in had the mix from newbies to Elite endgamers. The person who ran the shell was known as the Mother of Garuda. She could put the call for help with something for a LS member and it seemed half the server showed up. I remember when she put the call out to get people O-Hats. We had over 75 people show up and several were from Elite Endgame linkshells and HNMLS groups. The would get parties set up so when one group finished they next one was ready to pop. Almost all of hem stayed there until everyone got their O-Hat.
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06-30-2018, 06:12 AMSebazy
Gotta agree here
This whole thing is a caused by 3 factors:
Cross realm PF - This is unavoidable in a modern MMO I guess. Perhaps players could be prioritised within the same server to some degree but eh, thems the breaks.
Entering a Raid via Duty Finder - This was just a bad move imo. Even if everyone didn't see eye to eye, you'd still get to know the rest of the server's raid community purely by virtue of bumping into them outside of Wineport through to the Hinterlands. I used to know and chatter to a huge chunk of the progression raiding scene on my server and knew pretty much every top flight healer on the block. Now I couldn't tell you who was where outside of a few choice progression FCs and friends that I keep up with.
A dull and inconvenient hub - MorDhona was a great hub with convenient NPCs and a colourful aesthetic. Idyllshire was also a solid hub, again, the theme was nice and the layout just plain worked. Rhalgr's Reach however just doesn't do it for me. It's drab, everything is spread out and the layout means it lacks a centrally visible stage for people to potter around on in the same manner that MD/Idyll did. -
06-30-2018, 06:12 AMBrightamethyst
That's the trade-off have having the convenience of the DF. I have as much XI nostalgia as anyone, but I do NOT miss sitting around in Jeuno/Whitegate with my flag up for hours trying to hand form a party.
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06-30-2018, 06:55 AMPastahnak
Hunt community is ur answer, people don't like how u hunt aka early pull they'll remove u from linkshells, you'll always see the same people and recognize everyone outside of hunting as well. You can also make your own FC with being a tight knit group as the core feature or find one someone else has already made. Duty finder definitely makes it less personal but I'd have stopped playing if it wasn't in the game.
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06-30-2018, 07:46 AMLunalepsy
That era is long gone. Everything is streamlined and there is no need for core social aspects since every task can be done automatically without interacting. Interacting still happens, it's just not a necessary/mandatory thing. I remember back in the day it was compulsory to at least have some social decency if you were trying to find a party, do PvP, GvG, or at least being interactive with others. You could get banned from the entire server just by social behavior (trolls, ninja looters, beggars, etc.) Now since everything is streamlined (Duty Finder, Roulette, Dailies, etc.) there is no imperative need to be social or at least stay on your toes and have a somewhat decent behavior to do endgame stuff.
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06-30-2018, 12:04 PMNephthysVasudan
The problem is not the game..its the people who don't give a care or anything.
Had foxy lady fate pop up the other day....call for help came out in novice network...showed up....couldn't put a dent in her.
30-40 people showed up in the area...a rank hunt train.
Asked for help in various linkshells prior.
Did they lift a finger?
Nope...not one.
Just frak it all and ignored us.
Couldn't be bothered to stop for 4-5 measly minutes and melt her down.
My point?
If people don't care....you're better off squeezing blood from a stone.
The community you desire requires "2 to tango"
You get what you put into it....find the people who are receptive..and go from there. -
06-30-2018, 12:34 PMRokkuEkkusu
It depends on how people develop their own servers and respective communities.
Even with cross-server party finders and stuff, that didn't stop Balmung from becoming a server many wanted to go to even when it's congested. You could RP, hang out with friends, and other interactive stuff in other servers if you wanted to. But people at Balmung had more drives to do it on that server compared to other servers.
That being said, I don't miss the mass-exodus of the raiding community to Gilgamesh. Cross-server party finder and Discord were godsends in the end. -
06-30-2018, 01:26 PMRocketteThis is really important, I think. No one really hangs out at Rhalgrs like we did at Mor Dhona or Idylshire. It's too big, there's no platform to peacock or people watch on, everything is too spread out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sebazy
It's pushed some people back to Limsa, some Kugane and their own FC houses. -
06-30-2018, 03:20 PMKisaiTenshiI do not miss the hanging around places with party requests in other games, and I certainly wouldn't want that curse on this or any future MMO.Quote:
Originally Posted by MirielleLavandre
The problem is the DF/PF are not connected in a way that encourages people to join a party that is -just there- already. At 2.0 release, I queued for the first dungeon and thought the thing was broken because it was just there for hours. So I partied with the next person who came by. That was repeated up until Haukke.
The problem is that other games (eg PSO2 and Wizardry were terrible for this) are just "hub" cities, there's no actual overworld. The entire focus of those games are specific content, and thus everyone hangs out on certain channels of the hub city. Vindictus (Mabinogi Heroes) also did this.
WoW, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Tera, Blade and Soul, and a few other K/JRPG's I tried with the exception of Archeage don't have "hub cities" that people hang out in. You keep moving from an area to another area, eg the level 10 world to the level 20 world, to the level 30 world, etc. Thus you find the people you need to party with along the way to do the progression content. Some older games I played like Everquest, RedMoon Online, Ragnarok Online and NexusTK, has heavily congested "city" areas around the shop areas where you progress your character's role.
FFXIV has none of these, as the areas require significant backtracking to complete. You go from whatever place you start in, visit all 5 regions of the ARR storyline, and unless you do all your jobs at the same time, you will backtrack through these areas every time you level from 1-50 in a new job. Thus there is no reason for people to hang around an area. Mor Dhona was the "end game" area because that's where the entrance to the ARR Raids were. So it made sense to stick around there.
With HW and SB, you don't spend all your time in these areas, you backtrack and go into places you've been to before.
If all the game had was raids, then none of the overworld would need to exist. Thus everyone would just be in the same city, and you'd have your "server community".
But the reality is that the Duty finder was a vast improvement over previous games methods of party finding which required hours of begging people to help. That is why other games wound up making so much content solo for their storylines, it's literately impossible to have people interested in doing content they've already done, and players just don't want to help do easy content.
In Mabinogi, I became known as the person who could get people past all the "Ideal Types" quests back in G2, and someone who could transport people back to Tir Na Nog. This was back when the game was still on G6 before they streamlined the quests chain. This was the largest obstacle in the game because, it required people to actually help, and people just didn't want to help. I kept all the gear to do the ideal types at the expense of not changing my character's appearance for quite a while. When they released the Royal Alchemist stuff, that was a lot like the Novice Network Roulette for that game. Except you had to actually earn it. Constantly.
This is a lesson that all MMORPG developers had to learn the hard way. You can not make storyline content party-mandatory, because players will get MSQ-locked waiting for people who are willing to do it. And we see this variation in the MSQ roulette with the cutscene lock.
The largest obstacle to having any kind of server community is actually how the linkshells and FC's work. If you want everyone to hang out in one or two areas, you have to make it so that the linkshells and FC's have a reason to not be used for regular conversations, and even in other games, that just isn't a thing. Usually the central hangout in a game is where the bank is. There is no bank in FFXIV, there's the FC chest and there's the retainer bells. The mailbox is often the place where RMT hang out.
FFXIV would have to remove all of these things and place them where they want players to go, and then it would be a RMT target hell. Perhaps in 5.0 they will realize the folly of this and remove the FC chests from all of the 2.x areas, and all the retainer bells, and make it so that the retainer bells are only in the housing areas central hub or in the house, and the FC chests are only inside the Squadron barracks and inside houses. A mistake that was caught between Rapture and 1.0 beta was that the Aetherytes were originally going to be in the middle of the adventurer guilds, but that would make those places super-congested. So they moved them. You can see the remains of these in how Ul'dah and Limsa Lominsa adventurer's guilds are designed with a large space in the middle.
There were the areas originally intended for players to gather, and yet... they're basically abandoned. Nobody hangs them. Rather people hang around the Marketboards if they're crafting, otherwise they're off in their house or AFK inside the inn room or squadron barracks.
Like perhaps the ideal thing would be to remove the "servers" entirely as a thing, and rather let players toggle which "instance" of that zone they want to go to, and for underpopulated areas, there would be no need for more than one instance channel. It would essentially self-balance, and in congested zones it would spin up additional instances. Housing areas would still be defined by the server they are on, so one server couldn't buy housing on another without moving there. The retainers and marketboard would likewise be held to only their server. Players would not be permitted to trade items between players on other servers except through specific escrow npc's that would impose limits on the number of transactions and would not permit trading items or gil to players that if the item is available on their own marketboard. -
07-01-2018, 03:17 PMTeirenAll of this is exactly how Guild Wars 2 works. I didn't play it a lot, but it was a somewhat strange and fantastic thing to experience. The real issue is that basically every single thing is instanced in FFXIV. Of course The Hunt communities are the only "real" community. That's the only real thing to do out in the world that takes any real amount of time! That is, after the first few months of the expansion when people are levelling jobs on FATEs. Also, it's ridiculous that they removed having to go out in the world to enter raids. It's like they decided to completely give up on server community/game world for some reason.Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
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07-01-2018, 11:10 PMEndeleon
I don't think the cross server df is the reason for that, there wasn't much of a community feel even before that was created. I think it's just the casual nature of the game. (And most games nowadays)
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07-02-2018, 12:48 AMDzian
People are generally too selfish these days. They pretty much expect to be able to press a button and demand help without earning it.. aka duty finder..
Commitment is another issue as is impatience.. you see examples of these quite frequently as people will often say there statics fall apart as soon as they get a clear when people jump to a new static to clear the next one faster. No loyalty to the people that helped them through. Just
seeya bye and leave them all stuck
When they added potd you also saw it. People wanted to do 51-200 in a single session because no way could they do like 50 floors today and 50 more on friday. Cant possibly rely on those 3 people to turn up on friday so it must all be done nowwwwww.
The duty finder has broken up so many groups over the years. Even in arr. I knew a group of 4 friends who said they'd do relic together. Then overtime one has a day off so he'll work on his atma books or dungeon drops and before long everyones at totally different stages. And leaving there friends behind.
But the game practically encourages anti social behaviour. Right down to a story level.
"You can not progress this quest because your in a party with friends. Please disband to continue.."
we want to do the story together it's a god dam mmo after all.
You know.... Massively multiplayer..
cold steel in storm blood for example a whole group of us at the exact same point standing next to the exact same npc trying to get into that instance. All forced to go separately. And the same thing again at several points in the story...
How much less stress on the server would there have been if we could have gone as group. Then youd havec1 instance running instead of 4 or 6. You cant even say it's because thecdifficultynisvtuned for an individual because there's none..
One off the instances where you take that bridge and minago glamours the flag i honestly put my controller down for about 5 mins to go answer tbe door sign for a package and give a courier something to take back and make the kids a drimk... came back to my ps4 and within seconds of picking up my controller. Duty complete.. I was not even there.... I literally left my character auto attacking something.
Raiding again promotes anti social behaviour. Got your weekly drops. No you can't go and help a friend because you'll take away there loot chests... seriouslyyyy.
It's funny because this is supposed to be the often dubbed internet age of social gaming. But it couldn't be further from the truth.. i mean sure we play with other peoples but very rarely social. Even in duty finder less than 10% of people even say hi. And 10% is probably being incredibly generous at that. -
07-02-2018, 02:23 AMAyer2015
I don't have a solution for it, or have a solid notion of what the cause is even, but yes community in MMOs in general feels lacking. People are not very talkative these days.
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07-02-2018, 02:36 AMValkyrie_LennethCombination of Free Companies, Linkshells, and Discord.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ayer2015
I don't think people are less social, I think they are just more social in private chats.
Hunts are probably the biggest server community, and for a very long time, and probably still today, hunt communities are very toxic. -
07-02-2018, 04:26 AMKisaiTenshiMabinogi and Vinctictus doesn't even disguise the fact there are other instances, but what happens in those games is that everyone crams into the most stable channel and that channel crashes more often, and nobody bothers to check the other channels markets (because it wasn't searchable, only the housing was.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Teiren
Like to a certain extent, that *IS* the right thing to do, so you end up with certain communities on certain channels, but it also fails in other ways. In Mabinogi, you could defeat the field boss... on ... every... channel... and get the rewards and experience like 6-10 times if you're the first one there and 50 people show up.
I actually loathe how certain things aren't RNG, and are instead based on time since the server started up/last defeated. This is why I find Eureka offputting. The NM's work in exactly the same way, after it's recently been defeated, may as well try to jump to another instance, cause it's not going to show up again while you're there. The Hunts have a similar issue in regards to how people will basically find the monster people are waiting for and try to take it on themselves. At least in Mabinogi it announced it to the zone when it spawned. -
07-02-2018, 05:34 AMEnlaWhich isn't a bad thing. When the most thought provoking commentary I've seen from the wider community happens to be 'are traps /insert joke here/', it's hard not to gravitate towards the relative comfort of my close group of actual friends for enjoyment of the game. Personally as someone who started MMO's later into the cycle with GW2, which had it's own issues pre-mega server, I cannot find any nostalgia for this 'server community' that people seem upset over. Especially when others point out the sheer hassle of trying to find people to group with. I went back and tried LoTRO and that kind of hassle was precisely the reason I never did group content there. I have limited time to play as it is, and I'd rather not spend it trying to herd cats.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth
In the end it comes down to gameplay styles and no one is inherently wrong for preferring one over the other. However I would agree that the game is plenty social so long as you know where to look. When I was still active in the RP community here on Balmung it wasn't hard to know someone from almost every FC and or strike up conversations with other RPer's at the drop of the hat over simple things like their glamour. Hells even just checking tumblr there's weekly runs of Ridorana Lighthouse organized exclusively on our server for the fun of it. -
07-02-2018, 06:31 AMClaviusnex
Things have changed over the past seven years. The MMO player population has largely grown older and has different demands on their time. As people start full time jobs, get married, have kids they don't have the time nor inclination to worry about developing a game group of friends. Instead the game becomes something to play during down times or for older people like me with family members and our RL friends. FF isn't the only MMO to recognize the change to more casual play and changed their game accordingly. So I posit game functions like DF or cross server linkshells aren't the cause but the result of the changes to player population.
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07-02-2018, 06:50 AMCanadane/iceheart ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by DrWho2010
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07-02-2018, 07:00 AMSeig345
I've always found this an interesting Chicken-or-the-Egg topic.
People say the DF killed the game's ability to have a close knit community, but if the majority of the players really wanted that, there's nothing stopping them from forming parties the old fashioned way. Yet, it's generally observed that the majority uses the DF because fewer people go the old route due to the DF being the path of least resistance.
So the question (for me) becomes: Is FFXIV's community the same people who played/play FFXI, is it them + a large casual group, or mostly just that casual group with a few of the "old guard" hanging on "because Final Fantasy"?
If SE were to suddenly yank these modern DF conveniences out of the game, would the entirety of the community truly stick around but start to pull together, or would that simply drive off the casual group, leaving a more close-knit yet considerably smaller community? Would that be unfair to the group driven off that was enjoying the game as it currently is or should having a tight-knit community come first? Would it negatively impact the game's development cycle for the remaining playerbase if a considerable number of subs were lost as a consequence or would it allow for a deeper gameplay experience that didn't require such a fast development cycle?
It's an interesting social topic, that's for sure. -
07-02-2018, 07:17 AMBrightamethystIF SE removed the modern conveniences like the DF the game would fail in a matter of days. Like Claviusnex said, the MMO community has aged and changed. What worked for me in 2004 FFXI when I was 21 is not what works today when I'm 35 and just want to casually run a dungeon or two.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seig345
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07-02-2018, 07:23 AMSeig345Ahh, so it is unlikely that gamers who are 21 today are still opting to try out/play MMORPGs? I'm not disagreeing or anything, I just wasn't sure if that was a generally accepted aspect of the MMO community at large. I myself certainly don't have the time to play an MMO like FFXI used to be nowadays, but I had just assumed that there's still younger MMO gamers out there who would.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brightamethyst
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07-02-2018, 08:02 AMClaviusnexI guess a lot has to do with the distribution of players' ages. While there surely is a younger group of players I suspect they are not the largest demographic and have adapted to the current state of the game. I think you will likely see more comradery in newer games where the player base is closer in age, their point in life and progression through the game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seig345
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07-02-2018, 08:06 AMBrightamethystTo some extent, yeah. It's a different market now. Flash back to 15-20 years ago and MMOs were pretty much the pinnacle of online gaming. Halo, Call of Duty, smartphones, MOBAs, etc weren't things yet. Today though you have endless options for online play. The popularity of MMOs in general has dropped significantly over the years, and a large part of the current MMO community is made up of the holdouts who started playing them "back in the olden days."Quote:
Originally Posted by Seig345
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07-02-2018, 09:49 AMjameseoakesI'm going to agree with this, I think having to stand around shouting looking for group to get into most content is just going to drive people out. I know people who played in 1.0 and not being able to get groups for content is one of the biggest complaints. I'd dread to try and play though the story now struggling to get people to run the dungeons without the roulettes filling in numbers so don't think they'd get many new players to stick with it and lose a lot of the player base who would likely be very bitter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brightamethyst
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07-02-2018, 09:52 AMSeig345I see... Well, that's a shame.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brightamethyst
That being said, and as I've droned on about in other FFXI related threads before; as much as Vana'diel will always have a special place in my gamer heart, I know that I'd never last long if I attempted to go back to playing something like that again. -
07-02-2018, 01:22 PMIscahEr.... Duty Finder is "selfish and demanding"? The system that lets you say "hey, I'd like to run [dungeon], please match me up with other people who also want to do that"?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dzian
Personally I feel much less demanding just getting in the queue rather than asking my FC for help - people might not actually want to do that right now, but feel obligated to help me because I asked.
As for having to shout for a party... that takes a lot of guts for me. What if people ignore me? What if they join me and we don't get along? How long do I wait to call again without seeming spammy?
(So far I've only done it once, in Eureka, and did thankfully get a nice team mate right away. But it still makes me nervous.)
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While it's not a matter of "everyone knowing everyone" on the server (there are too many people, and on Japanese worlds the language barrier makes it difficult), my FC has a good community feel amongst ourselves. We chat a lot, and run into each other often. But people outside of the FC aren't going to see that happening.