Stories that focus on the individual should never require parties.

[Astorlok]

Sadly, it's pretty much impossible to have content that is both -solo- and -interesting-, and it goes against the entire idea of an MMO. I sympathise, but there's really no way around this.

I disagree. It's entirely possible to have interesting solo content. Make it fast paced, introduce some puzzles. I can't remember the last time I saw a puzzle in an MMO, and I would love to see it in either party or solo content. Just because you aren't playing with people doesn't mean it cannot be interesting. If it did, why would people play by themselves so much?

[Astorlok]

I like how people are "noway i disagree", "should be party only!", "need to work together"

Yet if you guys didnt rush through it on day 0 minute 1 you'd realise people DONT WANT TO HELP! lol

You can shout for hours on end these days for AF Armor and it can take days and days until you're very lucky and enough people who need it build up.

Hardly anyone helps, its all LS Onry, Grind Raids/Hamlets Onry. And thus the people who have busy lifes who come late to the show get fucked over because they cant do anything. And more annoyingly cannot even attempt to do it with all these stupid BS restrictions.

There should be a difficulty scale, so you can join into anything, with any amount of people and the content dynamically scales itself. A lot of games are doing this and Yoshi has mentioned it kind of in recent interviews.

So I can go do the story solo, and at least complete it with no reward, but if i go with 8 i can get awesome rewards.

Or a different approach. Why not take a page from Guild War's book? Give us NPC henchmen that we can add to our party and then tackle the content on our own so we CAN catch up to the people who spend all of their time on this game. No need to adjust difficulty, just grab henchies and go.

[Onidemon]

Because I hate resorting to /shouts for hours or even days just to progress in a plot. I enjoyed running through the main scenario's plot because I could go at my own pace if I was leveled high enough to do it. Job quests, and the latest grand company quest in castrum novum, however, give me headaches.

I'm not really in a position to have a full LS ready to help me whenever I need it (they have lives), and at times I feel like more of an annoyance when shouting for random people to come help me. I even used the search/party options, but it seems like no one ever really uses them on my server, even after the merge.

CC/AV/Primal (hard) raids for rare kick ass loot when beating them I am more than fine with having a full party. If I don't finish those, all I miss out on are some rare items.

I realize the job quests, mini primal runs, and a few GC missions are promoting party play, but when it deals with a story line centering on only one person, and no one else is interested in doing them because they already rushed through them after an update, it turns fun into frustration because now my progress is forced to a halt.

I'm not asking for everything to be spoon fed to me, things should be challenging, but I just mainly want my character to experience what happens next in his story whenever I have time to do it myself.

I feel the same. Just like some of the job quests that require a party to beat a boss. It's really stupid as if i am not playing for a couple of weeks after the patch and everyone is already done with it. Once i come back it will be a pain to find pple to help me with it.

They can force party if they want to but send us into raids and dungeons where people always go for different reasons so i can do my job quest there at the same time and not find 8 pple just to help me beat a boss they have no interest in.

[Astorlok]

I'm sorry I still don't get it.

Why make a genre that thrives on multiple player interaction and make all that interaction pointless? It's a crying shame that some people have a hard time finding groups but should everyone have to suffer?

You can't design a boss who needs to be incapacitated to kill if it has to be scaleable for solo, and in that extent who would even party if you could just face-roll the entire game because it's scaled for every single person to be able to solo it.

I guess people just don't have that sense of satisfaction that comes from gathering your friends and slaying a behemoth sized monster and reaping the rewards or watching your friends finally get past that slump. I don't get why any sane MMO developer would make their game less dependant on community interaction. Your just asking to get yourself compared to single player games that don't have to focus on anything but delivering a single player experience and then falling short on being able to deliver.

Multiplayer games are designed around being....multiplayer.

Single player games are design around being....single player.

MMO games are designed around being....MMO's!

If you go the "no loot" route then what would the point of soloing content even be? If you reward stuff like primal drops why have all the hassel of having other players know a strategy and trusting them to pull it. Why bother having any real hardship becasue you can just do it yourself whenever you want and get your reward. Christ only a handfull of people would party if that was the case even if the drop rates were abysmally low solo.

...I just don't get it.

Nobody is asking for the game to be made "single player onry". But for those of us who haven't been around since launch or don't log on during times when people who speak English are awake, the game has become an exercise in frustration for finishing content. It is incredibly hard to even form a simple strategy when you have language barriers. But these people still want to play this game, so they still log on and give it their best shot. It sucks when you aren't even allowed to TRY because of party requirements.

[Ashenspire]

People still hold on to these ancient ideals of "what an MMO should be." They don't apply anymore, you need to catch up with the times. One of my favorite MMO's of all time was Dark Age of Camelot. You needed a group for everything in that game. I loved that game. Would I enjoy it nowadays? No. No, I wouldn't. Why? Because newer ideals have spoiled me, and the waiting would drive me nuts.

Spamming shouts for groups is a thing of the past in almost every other successful MMO out there. You can either A) do something comparable for your character on your own (comparable, not the same) or B) groups are much easier to put together because the game has a system in place to make it easier.

Anyone that says otherwise is simply a masochist.

[Murugan]

I disagree. It's entirely possible to have interesting solo content. Make it fast paced, introduce some puzzles. I can't remember the last time I saw a puzzle in an MMO, and I would love to see it in either party or solo content. Just because you aren't playing with people doesn't mean it cannot be interesting. If it did, why would people play by themselves so much?

They have no friends who want to play with them.

[Isaveron]

There's a fine line between being group based and having to have a party just to perform even the most mundane task, which is what most XI players seem to want.

[DarthTaru]

The hostility towards these ideas come from it being an annoying and never ending theme on these forums with casual players thinking everything, not just some things, but everything should revolve around and be built on how little they can play or how bad they are at the game (or even how ineffective they are at making friends).

It's like the cries to nerf Garuda (seriously?)

Or the claim that Darklight is unfair to casuals even though hardcore players and casuals share the exact same drop rate and have an equal chance at attaining Darklight (skill levels aside) on any given run. Just... stupid.

And the complaining about relic weapons. First it was GC seals (when they've had months to get ready for it) and then it was Hamlet seals (when they're easy to attain) and now it's everything else.

And here we have a thread QQing over one mission (one... mission) presenting some difficulties for a solo player because that player, on ONE NIGHT, had a problem getting together a group to do what he wanted, so now a game nerf is in order.

I think the real problem is the community. Not simply "the community," the community that wouldn't leap at the chance to help whoever do whatever whenever he wanted to do it, but the man in the mirror, the one who plays in a linkshell with a bunch of inactive players from 12 months ago, doesn't decide it's time to move on, and is left wondering why he can't accomplish anything in an effective and timely manner.

My observation is way too many linkshells are clinging to something that doesn't really exist anymore (their linkshell) and suffer only having 3 people to talk to and whine with instead of just merging or finding a more lively group to play with. Only the Japanese players and the best NA endgame linkshells (maybe 2 or 3 on a server) are adapting with the times and as a result they're effectively and rather painlessly getting things done (Missions, relics, DL, Hamlet, etc).

Everyone else is stuck in a 2010 mindset inside a 2012 game and wondering why easy things like Hamlet or doing a freaking story mission seem an impossible chore.

[Yoruichi4478]

Because I hate resorting to /shouts for hours or even days just to progress in a plot. I enjoyed running through the main scenario's plot because I could go at my own pace if I was leveled high enough to do it. Job quests, and the latest grand company quest in castrum novum, however, give me headaches.

I'm not really in a position to have a full LS ready to help me whenever I need it (they have lives), and at times I feel like more of an annoyance when shouting for random people to come help me. I even used the search/party options, but it seems like no one ever really uses them on my server, even after the merge.

CC/AV/Primal (hard) raids for rare kick ass loot when beating them I am more than fine with having a full party. If I don't finish those, all I miss out on are some rare items.

I realize the job quests, mini primal runs, and a few GC missions are promoting party play, but when it deals with a story line centering on only one person, and no one else is interested in doing them because they already rushed through them after an update, it turns fun into frustration because now my progress is forced to a halt.

I'm not asking for everything to be spoon fed to me, things should be challenging, but I just mainly want my character to experience what happens next in his story whenever I have time to do it myself.

What are you currently stuck on? I'm on your server.

[giolli]

The hostility towards these ideas come from it being an annoying and never ending theme on these forums with casual players thinking everything, not just some things, but everything should revolve around and be built on how little they can play or how bad they are at the game (or even how ineffective they are at making friends).

It's like the cries to nerf Garuda (seriously?)

Or the claim that Darklight is unfair to casuals even though hardcore players and casuals share the exact same drop rate and have an equal chance at attaining Darklight (skill levels aside) on any given run. Just... stupid.

And the complaining about relic weapons. First it was GC seals (when they've had months to get ready for it) and then it was Hamlet seals (when they're easy to attain) and now it's everything else.

And here we have a thread QQing over one mission (one... mission) presenting some difficulties for a solo player because that player, on ONE NIGHT, had a problem getting together a group to do what he wanted, so now a game nerf is in order.

I think the real problem is the community. Not simply "the community," the community that wouldn't leap at the chance to help whoever do whatever whenever he wanted to do it, but the man in the mirror, the one who plays in a linkshell with a bunch of inactive players from 12 months ago, doesn't decide it's time to move on, and is left wondering why he can't accomplish anything in an effective and timely manner.

My observation is way too many linkshells are clinging to something that doesn't really exist anymore (their linkshell) and suffer only having 3 people to talk to and whine with instead of just merging or finding a more lively group to play with. Only the Japanese players and the best NA endgame linkshells (maybe 2 or 3 on a server) are adapting with the times and as a result they're effectively and rather painlessly getting things done (Missions, relics, DL, Hamlet, etc).

Everyone else is stuck in a 2010 mindset inside a 2012 game and wondering why easy things like Hamlet or doing a freaking story mission seem an impossible chore.

Darth -

First of all, if you read the thread at all, you'd realize no one is asking everything to revolve around how little a casual player plays.

Second of all, making things personal by suggesting how ineffective someone is socially isn't getting anyone anywhere. Simply, its a tacky argument that has no merit. It's far from constructive.

We are all here because we love FF and we love MMOs. We are all passionate here - proof being that we are all still here after almost 2 strenuous years.

It's okay to disagree and it's even more okay to be constructive. We all love the game for our own reasons.

At the end of the day, lets not work against each other. Lets work together (even when we disagree)!