Any chance on classic XI-style "pull camps?"

[Rhianu]

Don't take this the wrong way because I'm not doing it to be a jerk, but FF games, all FF games are known for a handful of things and at the top of the list are

1. Gripping storyline
2. Amazing musical scores
3. ...tedious hours upon hours of grinding levels in the same areas over and over and over...

Uh... no. The only offline FF games that ever had any amount of mandatory, tedious grinding were the old NES games. Every single one after that allowed you to get strong enough to complete the entire main story simply by killing whatever you happened to bump into as you progressed. You never had to stop for hours just to go grind.

Welcome to 2010...2011...uh, 2012 MMORPGS, the way of the future where ADD gameplay is what we all want!

It isn't that people have ADD, it's that they have lives. People want to be able to enjoy a game without it sucking up every last moment of their free time (a major fault that all the old school MMOs were guilty of, including FFXI).

Plus, many people who were in high school ten years ago have since gotten older, grown up, and taken on more adult responsibilities. As such, they have less free time than they did when they were younger, and so newer games should reflect that change in lifestyle.

there is no difference between grinding and quest based progression

since quest based progression requires you to grind mobs anyway

There is no difference between sitting at spot X and killing 10 mobs
or being told by an npc to go to spot X and kill 10 mobs

since thats literaly all the difference is, is thgat an npc is telling you to do it

Actually, the quest based grinding is more interesting because it feeds you a constant stream of stories, forces you to fight a wider variety of monsters, and leads you around the game's environment so that you end up exploring areas you probably wouldn't see otherwise. Those are all things that you don't get in straight up grinding. So no, the two methods of leveling are not the same.

SE almost had it right with Guildleves, but they messed it up by severely limiting how many you could do, making you repeat the same ones over and over again, and presenting the stories in a very boring way (seriously, getting quests from the exact same NPC every single time is neither interesting nor fun).

The newer, modified quest system is pretty good. SE just needs to make it more efficient to level off the quests, as well as adding more of them and making them more imaginative.