Do people really favor an FFXI grindfest format?

[Anty]

This seems to be the trend of today's MMOs lately. It's no longer the journey that people enjoy, but the destination. In that sense, why even have levels at all?

You're right, people want to have to pay attention. The current system is so incredibly boring, largely due to the broken combat system. I for one haven't touched DoW or DoM since getting 50 PUG for that reason alone. I'm doing the boring stuff now (crafting mostly) in hopes that playing on the battlefield will be more fun than it currently is in the future.

For many of us, FFXI's party system did this pretty well, especially if you were a healer or a tank. But that's not the only reason we prefer the party system over others. Many of us hate to solo, period. Many like to travel around the world and fight different mobs as they progress in levels. Leves do this a little bit, but it's still very restrictive. Many of us like to constantly meet new people as they progress through the game.

Whatever the reason, leves will never offer what exp parties did in XI, for those that enjoyed them.

true, but i don't think that people really want mmos to be that way. Since looking at all those mmos, they get boring and frustrating faster then any offline title. Mmo developers chose that way in hope to create a game for everyone.
They just missed the point that mmo is just not for everyone and so they keep failing and for some reason they don't
seem to think about it. They rather make it even faster.

Taking away the level-grind (only the level grind) and make a game level-less is a good choice, so you can focus on acutal gameplay, gear-improvements, skills etc. (if done right). But keeping the levels and making them no challenge from 1-X is
stupid and retarded. I think nobody really wants that.

My main reason why i liked ffxi parties was - meeting new people - reacting on new peoples strategies (sometimes you really had great fun just testing out something unusual, which you don't if you play with the same people every day).
This is what is missing in ffxiv.

I did a classic xp-party ffxi-like with friends 2 days ago and it was much more fun then leves, but there are just not enough mobs around. The better xp mobs are almost camped, so no need to bother sadly.

The missing of chaining, and skillchaining as form of a reaction, rather then BR spamming was also much more fun and
was rewarded with nice animations as well. I miss reacting a lot in this game... The only way we are having fun is with 3-men parties and no tank so things get out of control more often, so we have to kite, react, sleep, etc.

But as soon as we have 5-8 people ... damn this gets all so boring and easy... I so hope this is goin through a big change,
if not then this game is nothing but a content-less mmo clone with the best looking character models...