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

[Ichi]

Actually, the big difference is that in FFXI you're standing in one single spot for possibly two, three, or four hours without really moving at all, unless you're the puller, in which case you still only get to move like fifteen feet out from the party's camp, and you're just fighting the exact same mob over and over again ad nauseum. Plus, there's no storyline to experience while you're grinding away in an EXP party in FFXI.

FFXI has a great storyline, but the problem is that it's a totally separate activity from the level grind. In WoW, the storyline is combined into the level grind (which is actually how the offline FF games work as well), which makes the whole experience far more enjoyable.

And no, partying doesn't build community. Maybe on a few occasions it can help, but most of the parties I've been in people rarely speak at all, except perhaps to fire off their skillchain macros and such. But other than that, an EXP party in FFXI is usually dead silent; no communication at all. How can you possibly say that encourages community? How can there be community without communication?

I started playing FFXI at the NA PS2 release, and I continued to play the game for nearly seven years after that, and from what I saw it was Linkshells that formed the backbone of FFXI's community, not EXP parties.

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.

[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.