[dev1021]SP in non-leve parties

[Betelgeuzah]

Please find the right balance between the 2 (Now I'm not saying to nerf SP from leves, just improve SP in regular groups) so that regular parties are encouraged more..

There will be no such thing. Please don't start messing with two different systems at once Square, enforce using one system and make it great instead of trying to cater to both.

People will not be happy until both systems are equal/one is better than the other, at which point the fans of the other system will complain. This will go on forever if you don't put a stop to it, because you can not make the systems equal with so many variations and factors to take into account.

1) You don't loss sp when you die.

If you ever implement a harsher death penalty you fail as developers. Make the fights challenging instead.

[Rentahamster]

People will not be happy until both systems are equal/one is better than the other, at which point the fans of the other system will complain. This will go on forever if you don't put a stop to it, because you can not make the systems equal with so many variations and factors to take into account.

Well, in a sense they have certain qualities that, in theory, should balance them out (but actually don't, in reality).

Leve SP:
You can get anywhere from 50-100K per leve reset, but that's only for about 1-4 hours every 36 hours, assuming you have a decent group to party with.

Grind SP:
You can get anywhere from 10-20k SP per hour, and you can keep on grinding as long as you want, whenever you want, assuming you have a decent group to party with.


In reality, it takes way too long to get a decent party started in either scenarios, so that's a hindrance. There's also still a lot of confusion as to what constitutes a good party, and how that party is supposed to play together. There's also a limited number of good SP grind spots, as I noted in a previous post. It mainly comes down to a disturbing lack of viable choices available to a player in order to adequately gain SP via leves or regular mob grinding.

[Rentahamster]

If you ever implement a harsher death penalty you fail as developers. Make the fights challenging instead.

Agreed. Personally, I would try to punish the player just slightly, but reward him more for not dying. We had a good discussion about that here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ences-of-death

I also made a blog about what I would do to change the handling of death here: http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...entry?e=155429

[Betelgeuzah]

It mainly comes down to a disturbing lack of viable choices available to a player in order to adequately gain SP via leves or regular mob grinding.

What does this mean in practice? I'm not sure I follow.

Do you not get 'enough' SP?

[Keith_Dragoon]

This is why I do not level, I REFUSE to level solo. Soloing causes me to generate hate for whatever game I am playing, so as of now XIV is a very high graphics chatroom for me until parties become more common lol.

[Nephera]

if you give parties something more fun to do that grind random monsters wandering around the world people will probably party more.

I mean if you go to someone's house and all they have to do is read one book then you'll probably go read your own book by yourself.

or maybe some analogy that is less retarded, you know what i mean.

[Akumu]

I think the major problems are:

1) You don't loss sp when you die.

2) Leves create no real need to party for causal people.


It's kind of sad really.

1) Is just the stupidest idea ever created by any Dev team that adds it.

2) Guildleves are meant for casuals to get a quick boost for progress with the option to make a quick party.

The main problem is the only remaining patient players are hardcore(most) and there is no hardcore content.
Which is why people are so stuck on guildleves because its the only thing we can relate to in game(to level) besides grinding. Once they add more content for the party/hardcore base people won't even care about guildleves. The casuals will probably just ask for a reset of 24hrs maybe a bit more xp?

SE should make partying the fastest way to level(since the "fastest" is what make people choose their play style).
All they have to do is give a xp bonus for each member added to a party(8 max). Now the exact % bonus will be whatever isn't overpowered but still leaves it faster than just strict solo. This way it promotes more interactions since even having a duo helps. Casuals can still just log on and get their sp fix before logging(which is why they should probably nerf timer to 24hrs).

[Rentahamster]

What does this mean in practice? I'm not sure I follow.

Do you not get 'enough' SP?

What I mean is that there are not enough ways to get good SP. There are not enough options available to the player if he wants to get at least 10k/hour, and a lot of the options that are available have various negative qualities.

The best way to get SP right now is through leve-linking. But, you need to have a specific setup to get enough SP without wasting time.

If you have a static party to group with, then great. Most people, however, do not. pick-up-parties usually take a long time to get started. The crappy party search options do not help this at all. If you do not have any leves to contribute to the party, you are considered a leecher, and will probably not get invited. Sucks for you if you already happened to solo all your leaves earlier because you couldn't find a party.

This divides the player base into 2 parts: Players who have leves to link, and players who do not. No one wants to invite players who don't have any leves to share, so this is a problem.

Furthermore, all this time spent creating a pick up party probably took you 30 minutes or more, which is a big waste of time.

As far as choices are concerned, you only want to do Broken Water leves since those give out the most SP, and the other camps' leves are horrible and boring. Besides, everyone hands out in Uldah, so you're never going to be able to form a party by shouting in Limsa or Gridania.

So that's just a small taste of how players have difficulty doing leves effectively. On to the topic of normal mob SP grinding..

I would just link you to a post I made earlier about why there are only a few mobs/camps worth grinding, but the whole thread was deleted by the OP for some reason.

Long story short, the majority of the things you could fight that are within optimal fighting level have a low population, and a low respawn rate. That means that you'll just kill like, 5 of them, then wait around for more to respawn. Areas that have a large group of mobs that you can kill for good SP are few and far in between.

Furthermore, you can only kill stuff that are at the most, 10 ranks higher than you. Higher than that, and you don't get any more SP. This also limits your choices.

One more thing - The base SP for only 4 mob types are good, while the rest suck, so that only those 4 mobs are really worth grinding on.

Did you read my blog post? It explains a lot of this.

http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...cicuid=1555795

[Acydcross]

I would prefer SP-parties too.
But they have to get a better party-search/member-search in first.

^ this please and thank you.

[Sonic_the_Hedgehog]

Some of the stuff I'm about to say has probably been said, but I'm giving my 2 cents anyway.

I think these ideas should be implemented only after there has been more PvE content added to the game.

Make leves solo only, don't change SP/EXP boost rate, reduce the leve counter to 24 hrs. With this change leves become like daily quests, something for the casuals to do for an hour or two then log out. With this change people would have to go out and party get increased rates of SP/EXP.

The current party/battle system just needs to be tweaked a little. Some monsters need to give more EXP/SP for their difficulty and for others, less.

For the casuals that want to party but don't want to grind, there will still be behests. It would have the leve-like SP/EXP rate boost and the party SP/EXP boost and each camp would have level requirements. Behests would happen every 30 mins, but you can only do it once every two hours. This is to keep people from abusing it since behests would give you a party SP/EXP boost and a leve-like boost, which means a lot of points! Having the behest every 30 mins gives the casuals a chance to join a behest whenever they log in and gives others multiple chances to get into a behest since parties will be limited to 8 members.