Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Clavaat]

-snip-

I'm not sure I understand why people are against being in or finding a static. I basically always had one in FFXI just because it was easier to organize. Granted, PT sizes were much larger then (Alliance), but over all it was expected that you be available this day, this time, for this gear. And I would not consider what we were back then "hardcore". Instead of always having to ask around and hope people were on for specific things, you knew what you had to do and when. Time in between was yours to do whatever you wanted. Hell if you couldn't make it one week, it wasn't a big deal, they fill in the spot for the day and move on.

With FFXIV, my experience with statics has only made it more positive, imo. I've grown really close to the core 7 I run events with, but I'm still able to do other things and chat with other members not in the static or in another one. Does it exclude members in some way? Yes, I can agree with that. However, what I've noticed, is as one static gets further with BC, so do the others. Everyone is getting the experience, and afterward, we are able to join up on non-static days to try stuff between statics. Now, lockout does mess this up a bit, but we have a policy that after scheduled practice days, the rest of the week is free reign to try your hand at it with other statics, members or pickups. Sometimes we learn new things from this just by trying with different people.

Maybe I run it strangely, but really the forcing of statics has not been a bad experience for me at all. I can understand the impatience and the difficulty for people who like playing solo, but to seemingly treat the idea of a static as something you don't want just confuses me.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not knocking the rest of your post, you make sense. I seriously haven't touched MMO's since FFXI and this is very similar to my experience there so I'm not sure if I'm just not understanding something.