Quote Originally Posted by Amarande View Post
On the contrary, I expect a lot of people forget about Party Finder. When you first unlock it you've just completed Sastasha, and at that point there's basically nothing of note to do with it.
Once again, it spams the chat with "of the parties recruiting, 78 match your search conditions". This appears every 10 minutes and links to party finder, up until you disable it, which I doubt most people do because the setting to disable it is hidden in party finder itself somewhere.

What is different now than when I was new is that the duties are hidden. Back in ARR, while going through the MSQ, I would literally see parties for coil up. I was aware that it was the thing you use for raiding because of that. Now those duty names are hidden to avoid spoilers. But you can still see that they are parties listed under the raid category.

XIV is an anomaly among MMOs. "Raiding FCs" are comparatively rare here vs. virtually every other game that has raids.
I'm aware that raiding guilds are not much of a thing in this game compared to some MMOs, but it's still logical to look for one if you want to get into raiding. Your search for one will probably lead you to a normal FC that does a variety of things and they will probably explain how it all works and that was my point.

A lot of people try to avoid spoilers, which are hard to avoid when Googling
The spoilers are unlikely to be that significant if you've beat the MSQ though. The worst that would happen is a spoiler of what happens in the raid stories by spoiling the boss names.

Most people tend to regard random out of the blue guild invites as an annoyance in MMOs, and on a lot of servers, Mentors tend to be fairly neglectful of inviting sprouts to the NN and sometimes even actively skittish about doing so - largely because of bots
It's true that mentors can be quite neglectful of inviting sprouts to the NN, but this is because if you go through the list of sprouts and invite them it's like inviting a drop in the ocean. An hour later many of them will have logged off, replaced with a new set of sprouts that you didn't invite yet. It would get exhausting to keep doing it. A large amount of them decline the invitations, either because they are alts or some other reason. Nevertheless, many of them get into the novice network after taking a break from the game and getting returner status, which automatically invites them. Bots get banned long before becoming eligible for returner status.

Bots used to be automatically invited to the novice network and that is why they changed it so that mentors invite them. I don't see them in there anymore so if it's happening on any server, then a mentor is probably trolling and inviting them. From what I can tell, bots decline now anyway because it would make it easier to notice and report them.

Ingame, Eureka was probably the pinnacle of positive socialization in XIV, and it seems like it was a one time flash in the pan, unfortunately. Bozja didn't really seem to capture the same spirit, and this time around, there's no large scale exploratory mission at all.
Bozja didn't have the same spirit because it was quicker. It did have the same spirit but people were done with it in a day. Whereas in Eureka you would be committing a lot more sessions to each area and waiting ages together to spawn each NM together and there was a lot more time to talk and party for different grinds. In Bozja, those grinds are just for things you can buy on the market board for cheap and you don't have all these rare drops to grind for that sell for millions on the market board. Those all come from the raids.