Why should I be excited for Grind Parties?

[Irana]

In the 40s perhaps, but like local leves the completion bonus for the low leves is terrible and that's where the bulk of your SP comes from in a leve.

Lol what? Completing a leve at max star at any rank gives you anywhere from 3k to 5k multiply that by 8 , the amount of leves you get each reset and time in the factor that you can do this in an hour and a half or less and you are looking at a steady 30k to 40k each reset BY DOING JUST LEVES.

I been doing this with all my jobs since...last patch and I cant believe how fast it goes.

[TonyMontana]

Why is anyone excited about chain xp and grinding incentives? Wowee! Bonus xp for killing 1 enemy type in X seconds or less is soooooooo much better than doing actual quests. Gosh, Let's all sit in one area killing the same thing over and over again. I realize all games have grinding, and yea sometimes it's not bad to camp out and grind out a level. But having to do it from start to finish is not ok.

How about instead of feigning excitement for this let's get some quests that are worth completing. Not a quest that sends you to some obscure location to kill 3 mobs, then return for as much xp as 1 mob gave you. Hell, I'd rather sit in one spot and kill the same thing over and over again than do that, at least then i'm getting some real xp out of the same time investment.

For those of you about to tell me "This has been talked about, use the search feature." Don't really care if this has been discussed a million times before. You know how things get fixed? You keep bringing it up and talking about it.
For those of you about to say "troll attempt 2/10" congrats on lurking in forums and offering nothing but a stale joke that's been beaten into the ground.
Also, for the diehards: please stop telling people "stfu, it's a free game. If you don't want to play don't, it's free. GWAAAAHHHHhhh!" Well I've got news for you... might be shocking... you bought the game. I bought this game at launch. I've paid money for it, so stop yelling at people that are upset about wasting their money.

Dude you should be excited to grind because its 2002 and thats all we as MMO'ers know!







Oh wait no it isnt. Yeah you shouldnt be excited about it.

[Xenor]

Lol what? Completing a leve at max star at any rank gives you anywhere from 3k to 5k multiply that by 8 , the amount of leves you get each reset and time in the factor that you can do this in an hour and a half or less and you are looking at a steady 30k to 40k each reset BY DOING JUST LEVES.

I been doing this with all my jobs since...last patch and I cant believe how fast it goes.

Perhaps you could inform me of this awesome strategy for soloing leves on 5 stars then. At 24 rank 30 leves were a pain in the ass even on 1 star and the reward for completion was about 1.5k. I then went to do some rank 20 leves where 3 star was death and 2 stars resulted in a completion bonus of 1-1.5k.

This is an old post from Yoshi about ranking up. This is what I am looking forward to.

Hi, this is Producer/Director Yoshida.

In regards to the questions cropping up about what will be done to party content now that leves are being made for solo play, we are thinking about the below for the future of FFXIV.
(Keep in mind that these are just examples and we’ll be adding unique new features and upgrading them.)

Casual Party Content
•Behest
•Public dungeons
•Instanced dungeons
•Variety of defense battles/Chocobo escort-related features

We are planning to make adjustments to behest to make it more of a completion-type battle. We plan on improving Behest in stages beyond its current form.

Party Content
•Hunting NMs
•Beast tribe settlement battles
•Instanced raid battles

End-game content
Along with PvP, we are also envisioning a large-scale PvE, but since we are not really at the stage where we can release information, I’d appreciate it if you just take this as "They're gonna do it!!" for now.

For soloing as well, we are planning to increase the amount of content that can be enjoyed constantly while placing emphasis on quests and leves, being mindful to maintain a balance between the two.

In the future, I would like to keep on enhancing the experience point gains through quest completion and exp. parties in public fields. This is because at the very least, I feel this is "normal." However, I think the work will continue up to about 1.20 until the game reaches a point where I think the balance of ranking up methods is normal.

I wanted to mention this in the letter, but from patch 1.18 we will begin reforms to remove the current feeling that players are being bound to specific play styles. Travel-wise anima is a bit hard to touch on right now (as I've referenced in another thread), but we will be making edits to the return costs and surplus system in the same fashion. Especially in regards to the feeling that a loss will be incurred if you don't do leves every day, we are looking into implementing a type of ticket system that will let you store them up, and heading into 1.19 we will be starting the specification edits of this. (I will talk about the details of this in the letter following the release of patch 1.18.)

I deeply apologize for the current lack of content and focus on the core fixes, but we have solidified our plans, so please look forward to the future!

SOURCE: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l=1#post209336

[Irana]

Perhaps you could inform me of this awesome strategy for soloing leves on 5 stars then. At 24 rank 30 leves were a pain in the ass even on 1 star and the reward for completion was about 1.5k. I then went to do some rank 20 leves where 3 star was death and 2 stars resulted in a completion bonus of 1-1.5k.

This is an old post from Yoshi about ranking up. This is what I am looking forward to.



SOURCE: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l=1#post209336

I can 5 star leves on nanawa at r30 with both my con and thm with no problem... and I can SOMETIMES 3 or 2 star leves in bw and halatali with my 37 pug... maybe you need more skills? or the right skills for the right mobs? for example: make sure you have aura pulse for flying monsters? always have a skill that can stun? like leg sweep? Use defender? etc etc

[Xenor]

I can 5 star leves on nanawa at r30 with both my con and thm with no problem... and I can SOMETIMES 3 or 2 star leves in bw and halatali with my 37 pug... maybe you need more skills? or the right skills for the right mobs? for example: make sure you have aura pulse for flying monsters? always have a skill that can stun? like leg sweep? Use defender? etc etc

You're right I probably could have equipped a better set of skills but you shouldn't need an optimal setup from all 7 classes to be able to get good SP from leves. These are after all designed for casual play. My biggest issue with the Nanawa leves at 24 was those stupid imps using their special attack which will kill you. I couldn't even bring myself to do the Adamantine leve I had knowing it would be 20 minutes effort for 2k SP.

Point still remains that it is poor content for ranking up until the 40s. So is grinding. Give me regular defence battles, improved behests, dungeons designed for levelling, beast tribe raids and escort quests that Yoshi menioned. Much more fun way of levelling up than struggling through leves or grinding. The beauty of it is you can keep doing your leves and grinding, others can play in the way they want too.

[Kirith]

The ultimate holy grail of MMORPGs, making grind fun. There are various ways to do it. WoW has a slick battle system that somehow gives the impression skill matters (and perhaps it does). FFXI gave each party member specific roles and vastly different skills based on said roles, so coordination of those roles is what made the repetitive mob battles (sometimes) a little enjoyable. Add the selective linking and agrro, plus the subjob system and you actually had an overall bearable grinding experience.

Unfortunately FFXV's grinding is simply plain boring for now, so they're adding features to it in an attempt to make team based combat fun. The addition of jobs will perhaps bring back the excitement of FFXI combat, but in my opinion what really has to be edited is mob behavior and AI. Every mob should have a certain range of random actions possible, like attempting to escape, getting hate more easily from healers compared to other monsters of the same kind, etc. It's easy to do and would immediately make combat fun. They already showed they can really affect mob behavior, so this should be feasible. Of course it would take some time, but consider it a suggestion, if any rep is reading this.

[Xenor]

The ultimate holy grail of MMORPGs, making grind fun.

Why? I'd rather they made the ranking up process so much fun that you didn't see it as a grind. Imagine running a dungeon like Darkhold for example, spending an hour in there and come out with 25k SP plus an item if you're lucky. They should have made that ogre drop 5k SP and Batraal drop 10k. Have half a dozen of these designed for levelling plus other non-grind content and you're on to something good.

[Kirith]

Why? I'd rather they made the ranking up process so much fun that you didn't see it as a grind. Imagine running a dungeon like Darkhold for example, spending an hour in there and come out with 25k SP plus an item if you're lucky. They should have made that ogre drop 5k SP and Batraal drop 10k. Have half a dozen of these designed for levelling plus other non-grind content and you're on to something good.

That may sound like a good idea, but would probably end up with players camping the same dungeons over and over anyway. Grinding them. Having dozens of dungeons is like having dozens of grind camps. Boss battles end to be similar if you do a lot of them...
No, the best solution is still to make the dumbest, simplest mob actually unpredictable in its behavior and uphold party role specialization to the utmost.

My favorite battles in WoW were the ones were team roles were essential and my favorite ones in FFXI were the ones where the mobs were hard to predict. Goblins in the Valkurm Dunes, Divine Might boss fight. Those are only right directions, imo.

[Nikita]

Some people finding exp grinding in a party to be fun, and that is OK. I personally find it to be rather boring, and would like to see more alternatives other than leves. I would really like them to add quests with more effort put into them that reward a decent amount of experience, even some group quests that require an entire party to take complete. The key to success is variety.

Again, if you like to grind for hours on end in the same spot, on the same monsters, that is fine. That isn't everyone's cup of tea, however. I think they should really look into this when planning future content, because the people that like things as they currently are in game are the ones logged in right now, and that isn't a large enough player base for them to make a profit off. They need a variety of content to appeal to more players, including content for the climb to level cap.

[Kirith]

Really, i am the first person to understand grinding is boring in MMORPGS, but a MMORPG without any sort of grinding isn't a MMORPG. You grind mobs, you grind quests, you grind dungeons, you grind your craft. You can't escape from it as long as you play, it's what keeps you busy for YEARS. If you think you can do always novel content in a mmorpg you're underestimating the volume of things a human being can accomplish in a given time. I repeat, making grind fun through controlled randomness and player interaction is the only way out.