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

[RedHare]

Sounds like MMO is the wrong genre for you....

Sounds like your idea of an MMO is not the genre for me.

Taken completely out of context, but consolidates most of the 7-8 pages prior. Not at all aimed at the authors, but I think they'd agree that harping about an ideal MMO is all that really came out of the past 8 pages. Which, in my mind, is completely relative. But that's what we're here for, right? Anyway these struck out at me.

Party grinding isn't about killing the same mob over and over again in the same place, its about learning the class you're playing, and learning strategies to do with others.

Exactly. And let's be clear, that isn't just a universal attribute for MMOs-- the degree of teamwork vary from title to title. Square carries the flagship for the most demanding player collaboration and innovation amongst their MMO brethren. That is the SquareEnix MMO signature. A high degree of player-to-player reliance, teamwork and strategy. Slow, calculated battles. And no twitch reflexes that so many westerners identify as the cornerstone of modern gaming. Square's right, there's nothing modern about that. What you get is players limited in their capacity by hardware, internet connection, server lag and just dumb luck. That's not to say you don't need to think fast and react accordingly, but only if your team doesn't perform perfectly together. The staple of a SquareEnix MMO: a unit working together perfectly in unison, covering one another when one begins to lag behind and lightening the load when stress falls too hard on another. Its very zen. You know it is a Japanese game.

Man, I really wish people would stop saying that grind parties promote skillful play. There was nothing demanding about FFXI's grind parties. All you needed was the right items, right job, and following a guide someone posted on Campistarus. All of the mobs picked for grinding were the least dangerous mobs, in the least dangerous camps. TP skills were spammed at will, (in its prime, they weren't) few people used utility/enfeeble spells, and people stocked up on bard, red mages, and other buffing classes so that they wouldn't have to deal with MP management and whatever.

Completely circumstantial to when you played. Also...

Not many things in XI involved skill in general. Almost ever fight was tank and spank, kite, or melee burn. All came down to paying attention. Like you said soloing was one of the things that required something extra. That and properly playing an endgame whitemage.

Pretending this is the FFXI boards... lol. But all right. It took more innovation for a player to solo. But beforehand, who figured out what those right items and jobs were for grinding? Who contributed Campistarus? Who experimented for months with food effects, gear combination, and mob selection before writing a guide? Who cataloged the crafting recipes, turned hate management into a science, and started the actual endgame battle strategies that were so simple? SquareEnix did that for you?

Oh yes, the players from 2002-2003 made it easy for everyone. Maybe they shouldn't have written those guides, or recommend anyone where to level and what to wear? Is that really the intelligent take-away here? It took no skill because it all was catch-up to the guys that leveled before you? There were plenty of times when you could level off the norm, don't pretend Square didn't offer it to you. People simply didn't want to spend their time doing so when they knew they could be more efficient with their time by just trying again tomorrow for another good party. The art was in the planning, experimentation, preparation, practice, leadership and social skills with other players. And that takes more skill than strafing, bunny-hopping, and all those other skillz online gods possess.

It's easy to forget that 9 years is a long, long time in Gaming years. In in its conception it took every ounce of skill, collaboration and creativity available in the MMO gamer sphere to advance through XI. Of course, looking back nine years later, it doesn't seem like a lot of it was ever needed. But that just goes to show how MMOs do age in time. But let's not cut it short in the one area it really shined upon: making everything as absolutely as difficult as possible.

... All MMOs have a learning curve ... steamrolling through to Rank 50 won't teach you that. That's why grinding is a good thing, just like in FFXI, FFXIV is shaping into a game where timing and watching for cues are a vital element of effective play and you can't reasonably expect someone to learn all of that if they can hop to max level in a week.

My thought has always been job and battle mechanics needed to be priority 1. Until then we're all assuming there will actually be tactical, long battles. I agree a form of grinding mixed with story elements (like a Besieged) would be a wonderful fit. But the battle plans has to be flushed out before we can assume how dynamic large battles can be. Although we can't really assume anything until we see more of the new battle scheme. Anyways, the biggest drive to out-perform the competition (other players) is the desire for recognition as being a great tank, healer, DDer, or party leader, so on. Without that basic feral drive, everything seems pointless in this open sandbox. (So Jobs, hurry up!)

Like they just said above, it is a PvE game. As I attempted to state before, there's a much deeper connection Square wants players to share with one another. It's certainly not "I keel you!"

edit: Whoa what a wall...

[Tsukino]

edit: Whoa what a wall...

That is quite the wall, but I liked what you said about "skill." Too many people think skill = twitch and ignore strategy, experimentation, data collection, teamwork, and just good old knowledge and research. All of those are also skills, and they all separate good players from worse ones just as much as reflexes do in an FPS.

Also right about the time period in which people are referring to FFXI. Those saying it was skillful are talking about how it was in like 2004, where most of the information was spread by word of mouth and you still had to use party-based mechanics like careful hate control, setting up Sneak Attack/Trick Attack, and performing skillchains and magic bursts. The best guides English players had were reading mysterytour (bless that guy for providing something) where they had to decipher directly translated stuff like "it checks it ??? and is put into hand." The people talking about how the only skill in the game was knowing what equipment to wear are talking about how the game was much later, like in 2008, when everyone spammed TP attacks with pre-made macros that swapped out everything you wore for you.