Quote Originally Posted by Anienai View Post
Were you ever in the all BST LS on Phoenix?
No I was not, though I knew many many of the BST's that made it up and founded it (and it's many predecessors) I was leader of my own shell, and it never felt right to me to take it off for another when I played, so I tended to stay in touch with the BST community via friends list and tells. And I was often about and doing things with the other BST's that I 'came up with' to 75. We all knew each other in the pre Abby days. It was a small community, and we all tended to know what was up with the others.

Just to keep this On topic, 11 had grinds that make 14's look like kindergarten. Leveling a BST to 75 in the pre-abby days being one of them. So it's why I don't often feel overly troubled by the 'grinds' in 14. 11 was a game in a specific time and era, and it did things that couldn't (and wouldn't) be accepted today. As a result it caused different results. One was community formation. The grinds in 11 really did build community. All of Phoenix's 75 BSTs KNEW each other, and while they might not interact, you tended to be aware of how they were and when one quite you found out. And it was because there was no way that you wouldn't encounter them as you solo ground away in some camp to add a few K exp to your totals.

Grinding in 14 is mostly a dungeon thing, where you are tossed in with a server group's worth of folks that you can't really connect to. It doesn't really advance community much. If daily roulettes were limited to just your own server, odds are you'd come to know folks and make connections. But you'd also have huge periods where getting a duty to pop would take a bit. A trade most don't want to make. So we get a grind that ONLY ends in gear, not connectivity.

I'm fortunate in that I have a great shell of folks whom I do my grinding with. We run a dungeon or three as a group, and joke about and chat as we do it. It's fun. But I also know it's not a situation that everyone has, and how isolated many players feel. And why the grind burns folks out and they leave or take breaks like many in this thread speak of.

The ability of a game to form connectivity between players is a subtle but often overlooked aspect of its success. I feel it's why XI is looked back on so fondly by many here today. XI was a BRUTAL game in so many ways, starting with time eating, and there is a lot that I DO NOT remember fondly. But the fact that it allowed connections to be made (I'm with the same shell of people in XIV I played with back in 2005 in XI) is what people key upon.

I feel that XIV would be well served by things that encourage server communities and connections. How exactly that can be done is a topic that can be of much debate, and goes beyond this thread