Quote Originally Posted by darkstarpoet1 View Post
you are wrong. parties have ALWAYS been an effective way to level up. you are fooling yourself to believe otherwise. you add things saying zerg style 24 man parties were the norm when you know as well as i do that parties were NEVER allowed 24 people to start with nor was max party size EVER the most effective way to level up. parties since the sp patch back in november people have always had grind parties. groups of 3-6 have always been the best sp. i hate to break it to you, but it is true.

sure you could get good sp off doing leves, but that is only a few hours every 36. people still grinded in between leve parties and worked on their other classes. not to mention you talk about grouping and doing leves is not any different than it is doing the same boring pull and camp of mobs. if anything, the leves were more exciting.

if the majority of mmo gamers felt grinding by pull and spank camping was the most fun route then xi would have been the most popular the entire time it was out. the truth is that it is not the case and that is why it never happened. many people believe many different things is fun to them.

am i saying your way is wrong? no, not at all because you enjoy what you enjoy, but you must realize that other people enjoy other things also. to ignore them is just leading down a path of failure. to have success you must find the things everyone enjoys and find ways to please each group. to me it would be best if i had 10 different ways to level so that if i got bored with one i could do something else. doing any one thing gets boring whether it be quests, grinding, soloing, raids, or leves. no one way should ever be made the only effective way to do anything.
I must beg to differ. When this game came out, experience points were very, very random. I spent weeks testing the waters of partying, and the clear winner for SP/hr gains was to build the maximum sized party (which I clearly state I do not recall in my previous post) and fight very difficult mobs, while an army of mages spammed AOE cures. That was how it was done. I built plenty of 6 man's during that era, and they were very much less effective than the zerg parties. The problem with the zerg party was a zerg is simply not fun.

When they stabilized SP gain, the zerg parties died out. At that point, grouping in 6 group parties was still very ineffective compared to running leve-links, so to say that "people have been partying all along" is a half-truth. Have people played together, yeah. Outside of leve-linking was that the efficient way to level up? No.

Anyone who has used the recruit / search party features in the game from release to now, would be aware that there has been an ongoing severe lack of PUG partying, period.