More Horizontal Progression please

[Sandpark]

Pulling tons of monsters and destroying them = fun.
Doing the exact same thing in FATES = mindless and zergy.

Okay then.

The numbers don't necessarily dictate fun. Crunching through 100 enemies with little chance of dying & 1-2 hit kills is hack n slash whether pulling or not.(pulling can be abused in those cases)

What separates a deep system from that is pulls that require forethought from different members. In a zone of things stronger than you when outnumbered. The puller has to study the path of where to pull a single target & assess which monsters will link if pulled at desired moment.

If the puller pulls at a bad time, it could result in more enemies than the party can handle.Assuming the puller did a good job, the tanks job is to get emnity from the strongest enemy/enemies. Then other jobs will either put some kind of control on certain monsters, and if those monsters are hit or awakened by someone in the party. That could spell bad trouble.It adds an additional emergent element to gameplay.

What makes any mmorpg fun for me is thought and figuring out stuff as long as I don't have to resort to google more than playing the game.

The renkei system also added a dynamic/synergistic,emergent element to gameplay. Here you can buff other players as well. But there is no system that requires real time synergistic coordination and skill combinations to enhance party dynamics, they used to have a regiment system at launch.

The renkei system became less used as time went on because people found it easier to gain xp killing squishier/weaker monsters rather than fighting harder stuff that required the renkei and magic burst. It was a design decision, whether or not that was intended or unintentional is beyond me.
http://ffxiclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Skillchains
http://ffxiclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Burst

FFXI was known to be a hardcore game, not in terms of difficulty but as having really thoughtful, deep systems, and everything took forever to accomplish(ugh). I don't have another 8 years to dedicate to this game solely. But I sure wish some of that stuff from that game could come here minus the incredibly long time investment and padded stuff.
Anyways, why are we talking about this? I thought this thread was about horizontal progression.