any chance of Sky/Sea type areas?

[Wolfie]

Why do people want to play a game that is completely instanced? Games like WoW, where even leveling is done in instances, just makes it so people don't experience the actual in-game world. What is the point for designers to make a beautiful environment when everything worth doing is in instance that people repeat 20 times to get a level?

FFXI was nice because the level grind took place in the actual world where you weren't forced to do the same level 20 dungeon until you were high enough to the level 25 dungeon. When you were leveling it didn't always have to be in the same place and having knowledge of the zone could be a huge benefit because you knew of camps that were out of the way of competition most of the time.

I guess one of my main points is that competition breeds creativity and true knowledge. Being isolated from the majority of the world at every turn makes people soft and unable to adapt themselves to a situation when things don't go as planned. I always saw leveling in FFXI as something that truly readied you for end-game, not because you learned how to cast your spells in a certain order or what WS's made Light skillchains but because you learned how to interact with others around you.

I found the complete opposite to be true about exploration in FFXI and WOW.

In WOW, leveling via questing takes you through multiple zones, and you explore them in full. Leveling via dungeons takes you through pretty much every dungeon, and there is no magical dungeon that lasts you 20 levels; it's 5 at best.

Compare that to FFXI, where there were only a few viable exp camps per level, and level progression almost always looked the same. People found the "best" exp camps by some arbitrary factors, and nobody else did anything but level at those camps. I knew people who dinged 75, who had never been to the Zi'tah area, COP areas, or practically anywhere else besides the zones that had good exp camps in.

[Ryans]

I found the complete opposite to be true about exploration in FFXI and WOW.

In WOW, leveling via questing takes you through multiple zones, and you explore them in full. Leveling via dungeons takes you through pretty much every dungeon, and there is no magical dungeon that lasts you 20 levels; it's 5 at best.

Compare that to FFXI, where there were only a few viable exp camps per level, and level progression almost always looked the same. People found the "best" exp camps by some arbitrary factors, and nobody else did anything but level at those camps. I knew people who dinged 75, who had never been to the Zi'tah area, COP areas, or practically anywhere else besides the zones that had good exp camps in.

I never said a dungeon would last you 20 levels... I said you would do a single dungeon 20 times to get a level. I'd be fine with being able to do quests to level as long as they weren't something you did from level one until the cap. There are only so many ideas for what a quest can have you do before it gets repetitively tedious and the fact that you are doing it by yourself makes it a step further into the boring category and even worse party grinding.

What you are saying about "best" exp camps is, to an extent, proving my point. People without much knowledge of the game believed in the idea that there was one best camp and if it was taken, exping wasn't worth it. If you spent the time and learned the zones, you could get unbelievably better camps that weren't common knowledge. Sometimes it took unorthodox thinking to get a place to level and that only strengthened your bond to the game and the community, and in turn made you better suited to handle end-game content.

[Wolfie]

Not at all, im being very receptive, you keep blockading the conversation.

"You're just a boring person" isn't blockading the conversation at all, then?

I never said a dungeon would last you 20 levels... I said you would do a single dungeon 20 times to get a level. I'd be fine with being able to do quests to level as long as they weren't something you did from level one until the cap. There are only so many ideas for what a quest can have you do before it gets repetitively tedious and the fact that you are doing it by yourself makes it a step further into the boring category and even worse party grinding.

My bad, I misread that. But is it really so bad if people did the same dungeon X amount of runs until the next one was available? How is that any worse from killing Y amount of monsters at the same exp camp before you were able to move at the next one?

And I totally agree with you on "quests" becoming boring, repetitive, and low on content, but Blizzard has found a way to work around that. Quests now progress you through a zone, and they're all tied with each other in terms of story. So while an individual quest might be worthless in terms of lore or cool tasks, when you look at the chain as a whole, it's actually quite nice.

If FFXIV were to have quest based leveling, I would like to see something similar. One longer quest chain, with smaller quests that all build on each other.

What you are saying about "best" exp camps is, to an extent, proving my point. People without much knowledge of the game believed in the idea that there was one best camp and if it was taken, exping wasn't worth it. If you spent the time and learned the zones, you could get unbelievably better camps that weren't common knowledge. Sometimes it took unorthodox thinking to get a place to level and that only strengthened your bond to the game and the community, and in turn made you better suited to handle end-game content.

Proving your point in what way? 90%+ of FFXI players stuck to the same camps. When I tried to move people around at other camps, I was told no, even when I was playing a job with a lot of sway in a party setting (WHM, RDM, and SCH). This is especially true after TOAU came out and people did colibri parties. People flat out didn't want to do anything but the tried and tested methods, and it's an absolute shame that it was that way, because the game went unexplored for a huge amount of people.

And it's not even instancing that did this. It's the fact that there WAS a clear and definite best way to level. All of the other, unpopular camps had some disadvantages (like being in a COP area, or long run to get to, or had to sneak by high level mobs, or required unorthodox party makeups, or whatever). What disadvantages did the popular camps have? None. The people with combat log parsers cherry picked the mobs that died the easiest, that had the best respawn rate, in the least dangerous corner of a map, and with the least dangerous TP moves.

Other MMOs have balanced their levelup methods and made them all accessible, and people spread out among the different styles. Using WOW as an example again, I've leveled characters by straight mob grinding, by questing, and by dungeons. If I liked PVP, I could level a character that way too. The fact that Blizzard made it easy to get started on any of these activities (but not necessarily master them, end-game dungeons and PVP are still difficult), there is not one bit of content in the game that goes unused.

Instancing isn't what ruins a game. Poorly balanced rewards and play styles do. Instancing just helps with balance.

Why would anyone want anything besides that?