Well people partied at the beginning because of few things...

1. At the time there was no such thing as "leve linking"
2. SP had no cap (fixed by thm/cnj groups spamming cures on themselves in mass parties)
3. People felt.. ffxiv was ffxiv-2 and exp groups was the thing so they made groups.
4. There was no SP penalty really for having 15man group killing stuff.

The SP/exp from leve's and behest was low, because you can't link it, and everyone got basically the same 200-300ish SP per kill no matter how many had that same leve.

Best was to get a group and sit and kill 300-500SP mobs for countless hours.

The day leve's SP was boosted by leve link (think somewhere in november around the static SP changes) leve groups became "the thing" to do because you can link it, and slowly behest with that because its right there.



SE has a few choices though to change this issue...

1. Reduce leve link SP (will really make people angry currently playing)
2. Boost SP from normal mobs (makes everyone happy), probably not as happy as 1000 SP per kill with GA Dunes folk for dinner leve
3. Change GA to where, instead of a temp buff for a leve boosting SP, its changed to an 2 hour? Exp buff for normal monsters. (goes away if you start a leve/behest)
Or maybe like every 10 GA points = 1 hour, max of 4 hours.