@dev team ->> Thanks for bringing back party grinding, -really-

[Murugan]

i must beg to differ. when the game came out crab and eft parties were ongoing all the time. i know because i was in many many of them. after sp changes were made to leves, yes, people started running leves in groups. i do not deny that, but i do deny that grinding in a party was ineffective afterwards. you could get 20k per hour easily grinding on mobs in game(many mobs and rank ranges were above that).

if you get 4 hour leve party you get 100k sp give or take a few sp, but that is your entire sp per 36 hours.
grinding you could get 20k+ an hour for the entire 36. you could technically get 720k in that 36 hour span.

if somehow 720k is not greater than 100k then something is wrong.

sorry, but group grinding was always an option. group leve parties was simply an extension of them. we had plenty of times we ran our leve party and then went group grinding afterwards so to say it did not ever happen in game it a complete falsehood.

i don't use the group up search feature, but that's not to say that unless i am either farming mats or grinding crafts i am always in a party. group grinding before this last update you take 4 people to do raptors and get an easy 24k an hour. i don't know how much more it'd take for you to consider it as an effective way to level since you could grind any time of any day.

you also must take into account the amount of parties you see now is alot lower because there's only a handful of people left compared to what we had when it was first released. less people = less parties no matter how you try to justify it.

On Karnak, one of the most extremely low populated servers.

On Selbina we have 10 times more XP parties than we ever did, even in October/November.

Oh and also the situation you are describing only applies to about 5% of the population who spent that much time leveling their character. I never personally formed/joined a regular grind party after leve-linking parties became fashionable. After 2 hours+ of doing leve-links I was falling asleep in my chair everytime, and when leve-links were on reset unless my LS was killing NM's I didn't even bother logging on because frankly leve-linking burned me out.

I was not alone in feeling this way, and since 1.18 the amount of people playing and not just logging on for leve resets has skyrocketed. So obviously they did something right.

[Rhianu]

I don't really think those chain of quests with scrolling text lines of some anecdotal fictional experience about the npc constitute a storyline or lore at least not of the scale that FF fans expect.

Personally I feel the same about the quests currently in the game. The leves aren't so bad because you only have to read them once. Seems to me that most people never read any of that stuff and I'm sure it's their choice not to but those same 'lazy' people will watch a cutscene or read the 50 quest for their class (if there was one).

My point is storyline and lore should occur at significant moments where the player is engaged. I really don't feel like i'm learning anything about the world in these little insignificant quests, even when i read it's just not a significant moment, like a raid or an end-game quest, or a significant main story-line happening in Eorzea.

WoW style quests may not always be quite as cinematic as what FF fans are accustomed to from the offline FF games, but they're a hell of a lot better than the worthless, piece of shit Guild Leve system that Hiromichi Tanaka and friends came up with.

Plus, you've got to remember that an MMORPG needs to have a lot more content than an offline RPG does, which means the developers need to be able to create large amounts of content in a very short amount of time and with an extremely limited budget. I'm sure we would all love it if every single quest could have a beautiful, pre-rendered cinematic cutscene with voice acting and amazing action sequences, but the realities of game development simply make that impractical, infeasible, and unrealistic.

Besides, if you'd ever actually played WoW, you'd know that there are plenty of quests that feel very significant and really add a lot of weight and depth to the story of the game. Yes, there are certainly "filler" quests along the way that aren't really very important to the overall story, but to say that EVERY quest in WoW is insignificant to the story is just sheer ignorance.

[Rhianu]

I have played the quest driven MMOs. You are correct that stones are not npc's, and wow quest lines do take you through a some what linear path (this is really bad in AOC and AION) through all the different zones leading up to the end game content. However, its still an endless string of kill 8 of this and bring me 10 of that, and help grandma poopy pants clean up her garden. In the end, they are the same, one you strip them down and look at them for what they really are. A mostly solo grind.

The only similarity between the two systems is that they both have you killing monsters and receiving rewards for doing so. That doesn't mean the two systems are identical. That's like saying all the cakes in the entire world are exactly the same just because they're all made from flour and eggs, or that a Mercedes Benz is the same as a Ford Pinto because they've both got engines, doors, windshields, and tires. Just because two things are both made from the same basic components, that doesn't automatically mean they're going to be of the same caliber or be of equal quality.

I do not require a NPC to get me to go adventure and explore a world, nor do I need a reward to do so.

What I do need is a group of people to go do it with and have fun with.

Well sure, doing stuff with friends can make any activity more entertaining, but let's be honest, playing a video game that has CONTENT with your friends is always going to be more fun and entertaining than playing a game that DOESN'T have content with your friends.

[darkstarpoet1]

On Karnak, one of the most extremely low populated servers.

On Selbina we have 10 times more XP parties than we ever did, even in October/November.

Oh and also the situation you are describing only applies to about 5% of the population who spent that much time leveling their character. I never personally formed/joined a regular grind party after leve-linking parties became fashionable. After 2 hours+ of doing leve-links I was falling asleep in my chair everytime, and when leve-links were on reset unless my LS was killing NM's I didn't even bother logging on because frankly leve-linking burned me out.

I was not alone in feeling this way, and since 1.18 the amount of people playing and not just logging on for leve resets has skyrocketed. So obviously they did something right.

yes, we all know selbina has more people playing than the entire population of the game. you add up every server on the game, including selbina, and there's still more people there. we realize that it is the only server that is increasing in size and that the only reason other servers are getting members now is because se is limiting the number of people that are joining that one server. thank you for allowing the rest of the servers to get a few people.

/sarcasm off

the situation you are describing is exactly the problem. you complain that people never did grind parties, but say yourself you never joined one nor started one yourself so you have no idea of how many were going. i did and even on that low population server there was grind parties going on daily. there were grind parties going it is just easier to claim there wasn't because you, yourself, never joined into them.

yes, a few people have came back to the servers, but i can tell you that my server has lost just as many people that have been playing everyday as the number of casuals we have picked up since. add on top of that alot of us that did alot of battle class before the update have completely quit doing battle and went to full time crafters or just left the game. i guess they did something wrong too.

i am now a full time crafter and i know i am not alone in feeling that way either.

[Naqaj]

edited: changed my mind. If people aren't getting it by now, they never will

[Neptune]

You people (wolfie, dyne, neptune etc.) need to stop pretending like that is in anyway modern, and that grouping to level is an outdated idea.

I never said it was an outdated idea. Grouping to level is ideal. Engaging in endless battles without any context or story is primitive. For God's sakes, this is 2011 and we have all these tools at our disposal. Can we not get some exciting content to play through as we level? Is it too much to ask?