Let's have a round of applause for bringing grind parties front and center in FFXIV

[Verecund]

From a game design point of view, learning when and where to use an ability is a subtle part of a learning curve that people disregard. When you're given a new ability, your tendency is to use it over other abilities, but as you encounter new situations with each ability your understanding of how they correlate to preexisting abilities expands. This is an important thing to consider when you're trying to determine how fast someone should level, because each decrease in time equals a decrease in opportunities to learn the outer rim subtleties of strategy and the nuances of your job.

Sadly, World of Warcraft and other MMOs/games did this little bit about a thousand times better with a feature called 'PvP'. (and to a somewhat lesser but still-apparent extent with "dungeons" and "raids")

[ViolentDjango]

Sadly, World of Warcraft and other MMOs/games did this little bit about a thousand times better with a feature called 'PvP'. (and to a somewhat lesser but still-apparent extent with "dungeons" and "raids")

They've already said that FFXIV is a PvE game, and that all "PvP" content will come in the form of competitive PvE based events. You can't compare a predominantly PvE game to a game that readily hurls the PvP mechanic at people and expect to come back with decent parallels. Additionally, as someone who played WoW for a time and had planned to get into its competitive scene -- PvP is so ridiculously different from PvE, there are tons of different builds on either side and seldom do they completely overlap.

Raids are a different thing, and largely fall under the cover of "End game" even though some of them were lower level, typically because the higher level ones are the ones where a certain amount of skill is required, and in my experience with WoW raids -- people weren't very pleased to have to explain to you what you should be doing. Which takes me back to my earlier explanation of why end game content isn't a very good place to teach people how to play the game.