What does the community need?

[Nixxe]

Having seen how WoW has changed and observing that FFXIV has on numerous occasions added big features from WoW in some fashion, I'm a bit concerned that convenience and asocialness will come to rule the game. A good example of this is fates. In ARR, they were arguably the primary way to level alt battle jobs, though tanks and healers were a bit better off with dungeon spam. However, the dungeon spam was tedious enough many would still do fates. Relic and Anima weapons were also used to boost fate participation. This created a populated world full of players for you to interact with. Fates were casual and somewhat slow paced content, so it wasn't uncommon to chat in /p to people you were spending several hours with.

After the addition of Palace of the Dead, fate grinding basically died. Heaven on High is of course continuing that tradition. Instead of being out in the world, interacting with your servermates, you're tucked away in an instance somewhere with randoms from other servers. This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, but it is a blow to server communities and an active populated world. I don't think they need to discontinue deep dungeons, but perhaps they should make fates a better way to level alts, while leaving deep dungeons as somewhat competitive, though inferior. Deep dungeons have unique rewards other than XP, so people still have incentive to do them, and if the XP is reasonably close to fate grinding, even if not necessarily better, people will still do them to either kill two birds with one stone or for a change of pace. Fates also act as some bonus XP while leveling, so perhaps they shouldn't get buffed XP until you've already hit the level cap from their level bracket (ie 50, 60, 70, 80? for ARR, HW, SB, nextpac), which would keep them as a leveling method specifically for alt jobs.

That's just one thing, but in general, convenience, standardization, and streamlining are the enemies of community. Players will always form their own communities, but to keep those communities in the game where they belong, you need to make sure people have a reason to come together, not just once, but over and over. There are already elements of this game that have grown less sociable, such as dungeons. Some of this is likely inevitable as the game ages and the average player becomes more experienced, but I'd like to see SE actively fight against community erosion in the way they design.

[thegreatonemal]

Having seen how....

Community is there if you want it MMOs are no longer about forcing you into it to advance in the game anymore. Besides this is a single player final fantasy game until you hit the level cap. As for fates and HOH if fates become better HOH dies you can't have both its one or the other in this type of game people looking for efficiency will go after the fastest method and the 95% of everyone else will follow suit.

[Nixxe]

Community is there if you want it MMOs are no longer about forcing you into it to advance in the game anymore. Besides this is a single player final fantasy game until you hit the level cap. As for fates and HOH if fates become better HOH dies you can't have both its one or the other in this type of game people looking for efficiency will go after the fastest method and the 95% of everyone else will follow suit.

Yeah, I mean that's really the issue: "solo" group players have taken over MMOs. They want nothing to do with the staple game structures of MMORPGs, but won't go find another game.