Well... I don't really think it's the grind system that's so horrible. I think it's this grind system that's horrible. I suspect the roaming party is to blame but i'm not positive. Something just seems out of place.

Take a one player game like... Mass Effect II. I can run around killing enemies all night and enjoy myself, so why do I despise doing it in FFXIV? In XI I could grind for hours before needing to call it. In XIV I feel pretty much over it after the first ten minutes.

A few days ago I grinded 180K SP on Raptors in about 4 hours. Maybe 4 and a half. I was surprised I didn't want to hang myself but I really wanted to finish the job. Admittedly, it wasn't AS bad without surplus hanging over me like a dark cloud, but it wasn't exactly enjoyable, either.

One of the points that's come up is the community benefiting from XP parties. I agree that it benefited greatly in XI from grind parties but in XI you were camped. You could socialize and lul it up in between pulls. In XI you could socialize and lul it up while fighting because the chat window didn't wipe your text for every possible reason.

XP parties are just too taxing in XIV to be enjoyable and / or a time for socializing.
Everyone is in voice-chat because communicating ingame is too janky.

I don't know... I don't want to see people getting 30,000 SP just for completing a quest but I don't want to want to claw my eyes out to get 10K on raptor parties, either.

I think camped parties over roaming ones would go a long way in making this less brutal. I took some time off leading up to 1.18 and missed my leve runs and now have 2 jobs still in the mid 30's and i'm not in any way looking forward to bringing them to 50 via raptor roams....