Quote Originally Posted by Nabiri View Post
I like manual-attack but look forward to auto-attack. It will be nice to be able to type more than one word while in a party. Silent parties are really a bore.



All I can say to this is, I was always doing something and very busy in a party in XI no matter my job.
I never understood how people had the ability to concentrate on a movie or other game at the same time. I was constantly pressing buttons. If I were only engaging and hitting weapon skills I wouldn't be doing my job very well.
Oh I agree.

I always kept myself busy in groups as well. But there are many who were leveling jobs that, frankly, you can tell they didn't like playing but were doing it just so they could have the appropriate sub for their main ("having the right sub" is something a lot of people in XI were very specific about, as I'm sure you noticed, too). They weren't inspired to play the jobs, and didn't have the independence to say "No, I don't want to level that job"... so they did as little as they could get away with.

Other times, they just wanted the reward without the effort, and since they were able to get away with doing nothing but auto-attacking... that's what they did.

There are many players in the MMO scene who are specifically reward-driven. If they could play a game where all they had to do was walk around talking to NPCs in one little area, getting 20% of a level each time... they'd be in heaven.

But for me... if I'm playing a game, I want to beplaying the game. And so, like you, I made sure to keep myself busy... I'd pay attention to mob behavior, throw in a stun of some sort (I loved shutting down bomb tosses, for example), look for an opening and WS with another party member when they weren't chaining with someone else, etc.

Of course... on the other side, there's the aggravation of having people in you party who you can tell are there purely to leech xp while doing as little as they can. I've had people in my groups outright state they weren't paying attention to the game, but watching anime while we were in Crawlers' Nest.

I think so long as they implement something in FFXIV that makes it less feasible to rely entirely on auto-attack, that it'd be fine.