The Discrimination Factor of Solo/party to Casual/Hardcore respectively.

[lenn1]

I never understood why people love these horrible and mindless time sinks. Do you actually feel more rewarded for spending 3 hours forming a group to a 1 hour dungeon. It was like this before 1.18 with levelinks, if you didnt have a static group you would spend hours finding 8 people. I remember playing FFXI and sitting in the dunes for hours with an ! over my head and go for days without finding a group. We put up with it because we didnt know any better, but times have changed and the mmo community is 20 times larger than when FFXI launched. SE failed to do their homework and thought it was the same crowd, now they are learning this the hard way.

[lenn1]

Actually it will effect their gametime. Basically because the casuals will be using the option to teleport, if someone drops and you put up a queue to fill the void, would you rather someone to teleport to the dungeon or someone that wants to run there. you'd choose the first which leaves them out of that content. Which basically is doing to them what they want to do to you. Which is excluding them from the content.

Now thats been answered....

Wow dung finder took out the community in running dungs. It became much harder to find new friends to run with later. I gave up trying to use it. I'd much rather run with friends and guildies/ls members then run with random people. But i had an option to use it or not. There were always ppl wanting to play alternative ways.

If the community is big enough there will be ppl to do things both the easy way and the hard way.

I completely agree with the teleporting and how it makes the world smaller. In fact i wish they would get rid of the anima system when they implement chocobos and airships. But i do want some sort of dungeon finder system in the game. The reason wow's system feels this way is because its cross servers with millions of people and the odds of running into them again are almost impossible. I recently started playing Forsaken world which uses the same wow dungeon finder but it only works for the same server and i've made tons of friends in a short amount of time, even found a guild to join while i was in a dungeon. I know alot of people here hate wow that even just seeing the word gets their blood boiling but that doesnt mean SE cant take a similar system and change it just enough to appeal this game's community.

[Preypacer]

It takes 5 MINUTES, or less!

If you don't have 5 minutes to travel a short distance how on earth do you have 1h+ to partake in content. And by the way, you could potentially wait LONGER than 5 minutes just to get a party to do content, so your 1 hour play time is already cut short.

If you truly have only 1 hour to play a night, then any content that lasts for an hour or more simply won't fit in your schedule, no matter how quickly you travel there.

I was thinking this as well. WoW has been used as the prime example of instant parties/instant teleport being "the ideal solution". However, it seems that people are forgetting the part about how long it can take for a party to be assembled to begin with.

Even with WoW's thousands of players per server, compounded with multiple servers paired up for cross-server partying, it can still take upwards of 20-30 minutes alone - even longer - to even get a party together. FFXIV would have a much smaller community, much fewer people to choose from and, so, could potentially take as long or even longer. Those who only have 60 minutes and were hoping to spend it doing a quick dungeon run? Forget it. Even if you have a static party, chances are some aren't going to be ready "on time" and you're going to be waiting around.

Which leads me to this...

If you're *that* tight on time where a minute over an hour or even 90 minutes is "out of the question", then perhaps you should choose activities for that period that you can complete in smaller chunks instead, and leave the dungeon running for when you actually have enough time to prepare, set up and do it without having to race around like a headless chicken.

I'm just getting the impression from some people that they're trying to exaggerate the circumstance to make what is basically a "personal want" seem like an "need".

I mean, every day, in numerous situations, we all make decisions on whether or not we have time to do something we'd like to. If you have the time, no problem, you do it. If it's far too close and might take longer than you have, you put it off for another time. It's called being responsible and reasonable with your time.

I'm finding it rather peculiar (and telling) that - from what I've seen - no one has addressed or replied to a suggestion I gave, which provides basically exactly what they're asking for - the ability for everyone to quickly get to a dungeon or location that they all want by teleporting to a previously "unlocked" teleport point that would be either at or near a dungeon, or perhaps near multiple dungeons.

Either you can teleport from a designated NPC in town, or perhaps there's a teleporter crystal. They can use the Aetheryte network for it.

The only differences are:
1. Instead of being able to be conveniently teleported "from anywhere" to the dungeon and conveniently teleported back again afterward, you have to use a teleporter in town. This is logical as it leaves you close to markets and such to resupply if necessary.
2. You have to have gotten to the teleport point on foot at least once and activated it, like we do with Aetheryte crystals and nodes now. This way at least some effort has gone into unlocking the location and people aren't conveniently hop-scotching all over the world to locations they've never even been to previously.

Two minimal requirements to utilize a convenience that will save hours of time into the future seems perfectly reasonable to me. Not sure why that would be a "problem" for people. That is unless we want to get into that word, "entitlement" and the desire for having everything handed to one without having to put any effort into it.

It would also serve a double-purpose by, perhaps, being a helpful way to reach other areas that normal Aetheryte Crystals aren't located near, so it would be a helpful transportation method even for those who aren't in a hurry, but just want to shave off some travel time, just like Staging points, Outpost Warps and Telepoint Crystals are in XI now.

[Malakhim]

The solution is to create content that can be enjoyed in a relatively shorter period of time(in the same vein as levequests or behests), not artificially gimp content that takes a larger time investment.

[Preypacer]

They could add a group finder that you could select a cross realm/same server option so you could choose what you wanted to do. Hell... add a teleport option so you could choose who you get.

No no no, emphatically no to cross-server matching. That is a guaranteed perfect way to kill any hope of each server developing its own community and collective "personality". There are enough MMOs out there that completely lack any sense of a community already. We don't need yet another one.

Leave cross-server pairing for games like WoW where community means absolutely zero and Blizzard gave up on even *trying* to nurture one a long time ago.

I realize many people think "WoW does it, and WoW's successful... so that's how SE should do it", but that's an extremely short-sighted point-of-view.

For one, WoW was successful long before they even created the party-finding system, nevermind cross-server pairing, or random dungeons.

For another, certain things work well in WoW because of how the game is set up. Dropping "x-feature" into another game "because it works in WoW" and expecting it to work as well is incredibly naive. Everything Blizzard adds to that game is made to fit into the kind of game it already is and the way it's already set up.

WoW is little more than a hyper-casual, heavily instanced chat room with xp and loot anymore. Outside of guilds (which are also often complete trainwrecks), the community in that game is destroyed because Blizzard has made decisions, such as cross-server, instant-teleport random dungeons and extreme soloability throughout the vast majority of the game that are counterproductive to building one.

Please, let WoW be WoW. Let FFXIV be FFXIV. We can - and arguably, should - find solutions to certain issues without looking to that game for inspiration.

[Preypacer]

The solution is to create content that can be enjoyed in a relatively shorter period of time(in the same vein as levequests or behests), not artificially gimp content that takes a larger time investment.

I believe that's the intent, at least from what Yoshi's discussed in the past. They intend to create content for both crowds.

[TheVedis]

@preypacer

your solution is already in game
its called the anima/teleport system

i think thats why no one is responding to you, people can spend their anima if they wanna get teleported to a place after finding a party(unless someone will do it for them)

out of up to 8 people someone will have the point and anima to do it

and ive said ti before
[people who are always short on time have anima still sinc ethey dont play alot to use all 100 like those who play alot do

[Sypherblade]

Im so for a group finder utility!

I can't be the only one who has logged on....their linkshell was empty because you logged on at a more unusual time and wanted to group up for some xp/quests but couldn't muster the time to find people on a whim.... people will say shout in uldah or whatever...but how many of those shouts go unanswered?

a simple group finder que for xping or running instances would make this game 10x more fun IMO.... for us not so hardcore players....

[Malakhim]

Group finder? You mean like the elaborate party search feature we have right now?

Oh wait, nobody knows that exists apparently...

[MeowyWowie]

No no no, emphatically no to cross-server matching. That is a guaranteed perfect way to kill any hope of each server developing its own community and collective "personality". There are enough MMOs out there that completely lack any sense of a community already. We don't need yet another one.

Leave cross-server pairing for games like WoW where community means absolutely zero and Blizzard gave up on even *trying* to nurture one a long time ago.

I realize many people think "WoW does it, and WoW's successful... so that's how SE should do it", but that's an extremely short-sighted point-of-view.

For one, WoW was successful long before they even created the party-finding system, nevermind cross-server pairing, or random dungeons.

For another, certain things work well in WoW because of how the game is set up. Dropping "x-feature" into another game "because it works in WoW" and expecting it to work as well is incredibly naive. Everything Blizzard adds to that game is made to fit into the kind of game it already is and the way it's already set up.

WoW is little more than a hyper-casual, heavily instanced chat room with xp and loot anymore. Outside of guilds (which are also often complete trainwrecks), the community in that game is destroyed because Blizzard has made decisions, such as cross-server, instant-teleport random dungeons and extreme soloability throughout the vast majority of the game that are counterproductive to building one.

Please, let WoW be WoW. Let FFXIV be FFXIV. We can - and arguably, should - find solutions to certain issues without looking to that game for inspiration.

I agree with this right here. Cross server matching is a terrible decision, as I've pointed out earlier in this thread. As an FFXI vet myself, one of the key things that kept me in the game was the community. When you're forced to play with only the people on your server you begin to meet people you will see day in and day out. You get to know them, make friends with them, which leads to linkshells, which leads to a bunch of friends playing together and having fun.

You don't get this with cross server content. MMO gamers, in general, are selfish, in that if they're playing with people they know they will likely never see again they won't care about screwing them over via ninja-lotting or something similar. I think many people would agree with that. People work to advance themselves, not their guilds or groups of friends as a whole.

This is why FFXI had such a great community. Sure, there were selfish people who only thought about themselves, but they were the vast minority. Over the course of your time in the game you eventually got to know hundreds of people on your server. Your reputation meant something. This was influenced even more by the fact that you never had to make alts to play different jobs, so the name you chose stuck with you. Similarly, cross server content has no place in FFXIV for the same reasons.

My overall stand on this topic:

Ease of grouping for content: Yes
Instant teleportation to content: No
Cross server PVE content: No (I wouldn't mind cross server PVP if we do get PVP in the future)