Let's have a round of applause for bringing grind parties front and center in FFXIV

[Zkieve]

A rank a day solo? I'm calling BS on that unless you're putting in some serious time killing those mobs for 100~150 sp a pop. (either that or killing enemies significantly higher rank than you and having to blow a good chunk of MP to do it) Around r25 a leve didn't even get me 5% so don't even try to tell me you got it all doing those.

if you are getting 100-150 a pop you are doing it wrong.Been repeating myself over and over so dont bother asking me how.
Also leves rank 30 are broken.

[Pyrix]

Not many things in XI involved skill in general. Almost ever fight was tank and spank, kite, or melee burn. All came down to paying attention. Like you said soloing was one of the things that required something extra. That and properly playing an endgame whitemage.

White mages forever! I still kinda miss my little dude Pyrix :3

[options]

Sounds like MMO is the wrong genre for you....also: XI *did* do it.

Sounds like your idea of an MMO is not the genre for me.

FFXI had cutscenes and they were done wonderfully. But you didn't progress through the zones doing those quests. There were no stories to the zones, you just moved there and camped the 1 spot till you moved to the next zone.

What i am saying is give us a story on why we are there. Right now we get a cutscene and for no other purpose then to lvl our char so we can get another cutscene. There's no meaning behind it at all. Why do we need to run to lvl 50 when their could be a journey reaching every lvl.

[DarthTaru]

Well... I don't really think it's the grind system that's so horrible. I think it's this grind system that's horrible. I suspect the roaming party is to blame but i'm not positive. Something just seems out of place.

Take a one player game like... Mass Effect II. I can run around killing enemies all night and enjoy myself, so why do I despise doing it in FFXIV? In XI I could grind for hours before needing to call it. In XIV I feel pretty much over it after the first ten minutes.

A few days ago I grinded 180K SP on Raptors in about 4 hours. Maybe 4 and a half. I was surprised I didn't want to hang myself but I really wanted to finish the job. Admittedly, it wasn't AS bad without surplus hanging over me like a dark cloud, but it wasn't exactly enjoyable, either.

One of the points that's come up is the community benefiting from XP parties. I agree that it benefited greatly in XI from grind parties but in XI you were camped. You could socialize and lul it up in between pulls. In XI you could socialize and lul it up while fighting because the chat window didn't wipe your text for every possible reason.

XP parties are just too taxing in XIV to be enjoyable and / or a time for socializing.
Everyone is in voice-chat because communicating ingame is too janky.

I don't know... I don't want to see people getting 30,000 SP just for completing a quest but I don't want to want to claw my eyes out to get 10K on raptor parties, either.

I think camped parties over roaming ones would go a long way in making this less brutal. I took some time off leading up to 1.18 and missed my leve runs and now have 2 jobs still in the mid 30's and i'm not in any way looking forward to bringing them to 50 via raptor roams....

[mysterytaru]

Sounds like your idea of an MMO is not the genre for me.

FFXI had cutscenes and they were done wonderfully. But you didn't progress through the zones doing those quests. There were no stories to the zones, you just moved there and camped the 1 spot till you moved to the next zone.

What i am saying is give us a story on why we are there. Right now we get a cutscene and for no other purpose then to lvl our char so we can get another cutscene. There's no meaning behind it at all. Why do we need to run to lvl 50 when their could be a journey reaching every lvl.

The beginning of XI's original storyline for the 3 nations had little to do with how it turned out either until you were high enough to do them or had friends high enough to do them for you. It wasn't until the R3 and R4 missions that things started to get somewhere. That's comparable to the storyline missions in XIV that you get at R26 and R30, respectively. I just finished the R30 one and can't wait to see the next one. You can't comment on the story as early in it as you are based on your Ranks in your profile. You've just seen the 'go do this and keep busy til we think you're rdy for the real deal' missions.

[Tsukino]

XP parties are just too taxing in XIV to be enjoyable and / or a time for socializing.
Everyone is in voice-chat because communicating ingame is too janky.

I agree with this. One of the things that made partying in XI fun was, like you say, that you could socialize during the whole thing a bit. In fact, it's one of the reasons I didn't like "TP burn" merit parties later on in the game's time.

But it does seem like they might get a little better. Auto-attack has freed up a lot of button mashing already, and the development team has said that they'd like fights to take longer, around 40 seconds apiece, in the future. That could mean the ability to camp instead of moving around because you've already cleared the area.

I'd also expect that if partying for SP does take off, they will need to make other adjustments to mob density and such, but that's pure speculation.

[Lyndis]

You need to try looking at this from a different perspective. You are seeing it as "this is what WoW and other semi-popular MMOs have done and so it's what FFXIV needs to do to compete with those games," but that is probably a flawed assumption.

Consider that this game already launched in such a poor state every casual gamer has pretty much given up on it. Not many of them will be likely to return ever. People gave it one chance, they didn't like it, and they left for good. Back to WoW or off to RIFT or whatever. FFXIV is so far behind these games in terms of content the developers would need to work twice as fast just to catch up. But would simply "catching up" cause any of those people left with a bad taste in their mouths to return? No, because they're already just as content playing something else. At this point in time, FFXIV cannot possibly hope to beat WoW at its own game. Even if they add solo quest grinding instead of improving party camp grinding, why should WoW-types return for something their game had years ago?

On the other hand, look at players past and present of FFXI. The game is over nine years old and still supports the PS2. The updates have slowed to a crawl and no truly new areas or expansive content additions have been made in years. Many players were upset by the changes made with the add-ons, the level cap increase, and the slow updates in Altana expansion content. The number of world server systems has been reduced by half, and the game is in its twilight. Those people have nowhere to turn, because all other modern MMOs have tried to copy WoW (RIFT is practically a carbon copy in a large number of areas) to try and capture some of its success. There is a large number of people who are in the market for a serious grind game with a monthly subscription fee, hardcore accomplishments most players wouldn't dream of doing more than once, party grinding, and, well, the Final Fantasy brand and icons. There are also some minor things that would help out here, like the fact that FFXI players would be more likely to even hear news of XIV being better in the first place.

What's more likely, that they can grab a few hundred thousand subscriptions from the modern MMO market flooded with similar games, or from a market where the most recent game catering toward it was made nine years ago? I think it's the latter.

I thought this post was amazing. Really captures my thoughts on the whole FFXIV sequel to FFXI argument.
What we don't want is a game like every other game that's being developed right now. They're all copying the same formula (successful, yes, but there are enough of these already). We need a modern reinvention of the spirit of what FFXI was. That doesn't necessarily mean copying game mechanics.

Also, they do have other ways to rank up than just grind parties. Which is great! I would like to see behest tweaked a little though, that was an interesting alternative way to level.
This is what the possibilities I've seen or would like to see.
Grind parties - Requiring planning and then a repetitive grind based off your your class role. Exp dependent on planning.
Leves - Spike Exp you can occasionally do, tells you where to go and what to do and possible solo.
Behest - Slow Exp, mass group formed on the fly, little attention necessary.
Quests - Spike Exp that is not repeatable, offers lore and many other options.

Should probably require more than one of these above options to attain rank fifty.

[Galka75]

This is my opinion about ths matter:

The fact of rising thr sp rewards is not bad. But this will be an old school base MMO. And a grind party ALWAYS will beat any other method of ranking/level up. At the moments leves are ok becouse can make a good sp/hour compared whit grind partys. Meaby a little more of quest. Or adjust its sp reward will nit bad for ROLplayers and casual. Will lovely to see all kind of players meetng in a game. Casuals (not mindless wowtards, just casual but good players)doing leves and raids once or twice a week, rol players doing quest and focusing in the comunity, and of course hardcores doing it all a lot and grinding to reach fast all content.

[zaviermhigo]

Party grinding isn't about killing the same mob over and over again in the same place, its about learning the class you're playing, and learning strategies to do with others. If fostering better relationships with other players becomes boring to people then why even play an mmo?

[Chain]

XP parties are just too taxing in XIV to be enjoyable and / or a time for socializing.
Everyone is in voice-chat because communicating ingame is too janky.

Well part of the reason are the drab battle animations. (hopefully 1.9 will add more revisions of these)


I don't know how it is for ranged, but the mob pathing makes it just... frustrating for melee. I've seen mobs just randomly run back to their spot, stay claimed and just hitting us from range with no way to pull it back without grabbing 3 adds.