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

[Neptune]

Some good posts piling up in here.

Unfortunately, as I think I pointed at a little, I think the ship for that has sailed. The original team had such a vision - replacing the generic MMO auction house with a newer personal system, having progression based neither on party grinding nor on repetitive quests but some new system, and throwing away the typical class systems of other games for something more freeform and unique to your character. Those were all bold ideas that did not see the light of day because the game was released too quickly and they were crap in the state people got them in. It's obvious the current team has no intention to try and fix those systems up now and are instead replacing them. And I agree with that decision because it's impossible to put in the work needed to do that while everyone has abandoned the game and those that remain want every feature copied from FFXI or WoW anyway.

I think this is the best summary of FFXIV I have read yet. Unfortunately for the future of the game, you're right.

If they could make it the best, most unique game around that would be by far the best solution, but if the choice is to make it FFXI-2 or a "WoW clone" I think they have a better chance going with the former. Basically, I agree with your sentiments, but I think you are being too idealistic at this stage of the game.

I definitely agree that story should be more involved in progression, and in a way that allows them to do more than just the SP rewards that main story quests give now. If I had to describe it using previous examples, I'd say the storyline and dungeons from FFXI's Chains of Promathia expansion with actual good SP rewards along the way (instead of avoiding mobs whenever possible) would be pretty ideal. You could also think of it as like the dungeons we have now, or that are in other MMOs, but with actual cutscenes to describe the story, and put them in the main story instead of just for loot. Say much later on we track down an ascian, and follow it into a dungeon where we see it run within, then we have to fight through the dungeon, maybe meet an NPC along the way where you can do a sidequest right there inside it, and at the end have to confront the ascian in another cutscene leading to a boss showdown, then get to witness another main story scene where you get information from it before it escapes again. That would be pretty damned great and I totally support it.

However, I do think that it's somewhat infeasible for any development team to make this the sole means of progression in an MMO. As awesome as that would be, you can't take the 40 hours of gameplay intertwined with story in a single-player FF game and apply it over the hundreds of days people log in an MMO. This is why EQ/FFXI has grind parties and WoW and later games have terribly uninspired grind quests, and also why FFXIV had levequests to start.

I'm glad we agree on what an awesome game would actually be. The same thoughts have crossed my mind as well about CoP. I believe the idea of the single player FF experience but with a party of other people was present in FFXI.. but Tanaka couldn't pull it together. For instance, the climb to defeat the Shadowlord, or the whole progression through CoP. How epic would it have been to gain your final 5 levels on the climb to Shadowlord? Or 25-75 just in the CoP expansion? Not sneak/invising past every enemy in the very unique areas, but fighting them to grow your character on your way to a boss and cutscene. They had the framework in place but they couldn't turn it on. I totally agree with your thoughts, but I think it's feasible for it to be the main way of progression. Grind parties would still be doable just like you can grind in any RPG. Where there's a will, there's a way.

It absolutely cannot be equal for party grinding (or progression in any way) to be viable. If they are equal in terms of time investment to progress ratio no one will make parties because they are too much work - even the people who enjoy them more. There is a lot of time and effort that goes into building a party, picking an empty camp, and getting there, and that has to be accounted for. Beyond just the extra work that takes, you have to account for the fact that multiple people are committing to giving up multiple hours of their day in succession and that too must be compensated.

You know part of the compensation for setting it up is the fun of grind parties. You have to factor that in. I think you're thinking of back when no one would party in FFXIV, around initial release. Because there was a penalty for partying. It's never truly been in balance. I think it would work fine if it was balanced out. Besides, you could only do the quests once so if you wanted to level another job you'd be back at square 1 with guildleves and grind parties, so it would be fine.

While I'd rather not join the debate on "learning" for either side, I will say that one of the biggest draws of RPGs for me and many players is visible progression. I don't like games like Guild Wars where they try to remove character progression from the game entirely; if someone wants that they can go play some other genre.

"uss butthurt"

lol, yeah i saw that. The thing is it really doesn't affect me since I will rarely join a grind party. It's funny, but people could only be posting that if they aren't paying close enough attention.

So the gist of the OP is:

"Make the game yet another boring, monotonous quest grind for progression."

Am I getting warm? You can make quests "fun" but they're just as monotonous since you do them over and over and over again to cap your level, kind of like what you do with party grinding.

Jennestia.. I feel like you don't even read. Or maybe you read but then your imagination takes you to a dead end. Maybe you quickly associated quests with WoW quests. No need to jump to conclusions like that!

Meh... It's Neptune being Neptune... again.

His entire logic is "I have ideas that I know for a fact would be the best for the game. And I know they'd be best for the game, because they're my ideas." That's every one of his OPs in a nutshell.

Two of his favorite retorts to dissenting opinion are:

1. "You obviously are happy with the game the way it is and don't feel it needs to improve". This is a classic false dichotomy, a logical fallacy Neptune resorts to in practically every single post he makes.
2. "You just don't understand how much better his idea would be for the game". In other words, you can't possibly understand his point and simply *disagree* with it.. no no.. Surely its brilliance is simply beyond your understanding, because if you did understand" it, you would certainly agree with it.

The problem with Nep is he's completely in love with his own ideas and assumes that whatever he suggests is "right". And so, when you respond to him, you can only fall into two categories: 1) You agree with him, or 2) You're wrong.

This is why none of his threads can ever develop into a normal conversation and typically result in people basically ripping his posts apart, pointing out the flaws in his logic, calling him out on how he twists or distorts the facts and generally making him look like a complete fool. Eventually, he gives up on that thread and wanders off to start a new one to complain about something else and start the process all over again.

Perhaps if people just all ignored him and stop giving him the attention he obviously craves constantly... he'd get the picture and give it up.

I'm flattered that you have gotten to know me so well. You're onto something. A thread like this wasn't necessarily posted for discussion, as are some of my threads. This one was more like a statement. In fact, before these boards opened I would probably have submitted it as an email under suggestions and feedback, as I did many times under Tanaka in FFXI. I don't want you to feel like you don't matter to me if you disagree with me, and sometimes I get a little pointed if people defend points of view that are harmful to other players. Anyway, I don't give up on threads because there's no need to perpetuate a thread in the first place. It gets its fair share of attention and either the dev team reads it or they don't, same as with an email to suggestions and feedback. In fact, 90% of the replies in one of my threads have nothing to do with the OP and are just filled with people's superficial reactions to the topic instead of an actual discussion about the pros and cons - something I would be happy to engage in.