Why I believe the Serverless Dungeon Finder isn't the end of the world.

[Fadigre]

You know there's a big red freaking meteor in the sky, right?
Dalamund is a serious threat to all life and people are freaking out over Dungeon Finders.

Whatever

Everybody's throwing their two cents around about this 'serverless dungeon finder' jazz. I've been reading about it for the last few days.
Most of what I read is negative.

It has been reiterated time and time again that people will use the dungeon finder instead of the standard way to fight through dungeons because of the convenience of finding a party through a queue rather than... whatever the other option is.
I've not seen anybody touch on this other option; it's as if even the name of it has been forgotten in the deluge of serverless posts. From what I understand the other option is to have your own group of battle-hardened warrios. I think these are called Linkshells or... something.
Or at least I think that was the other option... right?



Let's compare the present and the future!
You log in and idlely stand around in Ul’Dah waiting for a pick-up group shout when you finally find one.
So you're all geared up and you've said your hellos, off you go to Ifrit! You fight a good 3 fights and in one of those everybody actually managed to survive Hellfire (What are the chances!) but you don't get any wins. You slope back off to Ul'Dah to wait for another shout. You spend the time sulking how you wasted both your time and anima as everybody else pulled the old 'Oh, I spent all my anima teleporting the last party!'

Oh well. He who dares wins, right?
You find another party and you manage to get one win down. Congratulations! It was fortunate that Ifrit kept using his dash attack this time to give you time to re-raise the dead! You certainly showed him what was what!
You skip out of the instance merrily with your new best friends who you'll never speak to ever again because there was an argument about having melee DDs attacking Ifrit. Oh well, at least you got a Totem out of it. Tonight you can sleep well in the knowledge that you actually achieved something today, soldier.

Let’s take this story (I’ll call it the Ballad of Darwin Delmonty, the bravest Traumaturge to ever sail the Aether) and knock it forward a few months. Suddenly Darwin is sitting in a Dungeon Finder queue for Ifrit. He still says hello, he still wipes all the time and he still gets into arguments about who should do what. All that has changed is that now poor Darwin doesn’t have to spend his anima and wait for an hour or two for a feeble shout to appear in his chat log.



I hate using WoW as a comparison but the instances you can dance through whilst leveling up are nothing in comparison to running your way through Darkhold. You can't just run forward and expect the strategy to fall into place as you progress, you really need to understand what it is that is taking place and when. Some pick-up groups get this communication issue sorted however most are completely oblivious of each other and this will not change with a serverless queue. In fact if you’re playing serverless it might become even more difficult as you’ll have to contend with the huge amount of German players here on Ragnarok and those batshit insane RP players on Balmung. Playing on Besaid used to keep me up at night after seeing what I saw.



There is a counter argument that players will be forced to use the pick-up party queue due to linkshells already being established and ignorant to new player requests (I don't know which linkshells these are... I know the one I'm in on Ragnarok supports its members and regularly teaches new members how to run our events) but in reality this is no different to current Ul'Dah shouts as people have taken to shouting for 'players with experience'.



If you are going to clear anything in this game regularly and successfully you will need to either forge your own community or join one. More casual players may find salvation in being able to quickly find a party to hang out in murky dungeons for an hour but the majority of players will continue to use their linkshell community to best these dungeons. I don't expect any pick-up parties to ever have the time, patience, efficiency or success rate of a linkshell community.


I would also like to state that a few days ago I woke up to my dreary lifestyle. I stumbled out of bed and mooched around in the shower for a good 15 minutes. That morning I wondered if I could be bothered to fight Ifrit again that evening and if I got 10 totems... what would I spend them on? Do I really want these weapons? I then changed my mind and decided that perhaps the fight itself won’t always appeal to me but I know for sure that playing with my new companions to take down the Lord of the Inferno one more time always will.



In closing, serverless dungeon finders is not 100% of version 2.0. I would say that once we have received version 2.0 that the dungeon finder will be about 2-3% of the content that will actually matter to people. Content that actually does change the game and how the community looks at it.