Fun Activities

[Jeeqbit]

Sounds like you've done a bit of everything! Anything you particularly enjoyed?

• Hunting is fun (both spawning and conducting) which is why I mentioned them. I also like that the mechanics generally 1-shot you if you get them wrong - a rarity in casual content. They can melt if too many people are there, so fighting them on low pop worlds, during patch lulls or at quiet hours is nice.
• Progressing raids with a static is fun. It's fun because you are making progress together with people who have become regular friends that are having fun in discord. Those are some of my fondest memories for sure. Blue Mage raiding is great as well because choosing actions is a bit like having specs/trees in other MMORPGs.
• Farming extremes is fun. It can go different every time if someone messes up. And then it's fun if you get a perfect run too. You never know what sort of run it'll be or who you'll meet in PF, and meeting different people is nice.
• Helping others clear raids is fun. You get to teach them and while it can be a tedious if they don't progress fast, it's fun if you helped them get the clear. I usually join ones that are relatively easy, or that are past the "difficult" mechanic, because then I know there is a 95% chance it will be a clear and won't be a trap party. I joined mostly prog-to-clear parties for the latest ex to help them clear so I met so many people and had great chats.
• Long ago, when I started, I used to do RP and RP is a lot of fun. The problem is just the scheduling - waiting for everyone else to be there to RP with. You potentiallly have to pause your RP because they aren't there to continue it.
• Field Operations such as Eureka and Bozja (we are getting a new one imminently). Although they were grindy, there were some things that made each of them fun, so let me explain.
  
  Eureka was very punishing, so enemies would kill you a lot and you had to beg people in /shout for a rez or you would de-level. You also had to wait ages - sometimes 30-60 minutes - for the bosses to spawn, during which time you'd all just talk together in /shout and that was fun. You were able to spend that time forming parties to farm for light or treasure, which was also social. Fighting certain NMs was fun, and there was a big raid at the end of it. You had to navigate dangerous dragons to get to NMs and before the nerfs you had to do this until max level, so you would walk past bodies on the way to NMs always. It was joy being one of the few who could get past the dragons successfully.
  
  Bozja was fun for a different reason. The CEs were way deadlier, better designed and more fun, and had you party up. The parties would often persist after it, causing you all to chat about all sorts of things while farming Skirmishes or clusters together. There were some more casual-friendly versions of raids in Bozja that were also just better designed and they were a lot of fun to do - not so hard that they weren't beaten in 1-3 tries, but not ridiculously easy like most content in the game.
• PvP is fun. I mean all the different forms of it. I am a big fan of direct PvP and the most direct it gets is Crystalline Conflict. Every match is different because unlike all the scripted duties we have, PvP is made dynamic by players. But I find Frontline fun as well, it just takes time to appreciate Frontline because it sucks until you understand how it works and can strategize in /alliance chat and point people to objectives. Rival Wings is tons of fun because it's about mechs, charging them up and destroying the enemies - the majority of players don't understand how it works so it's easy to win in it. Downside is people often don't queue for Rival Wings at all. That said, I need a motivation to do PvP so I don't overdo it, so I only do it for my series exp each major patch until rank 25.
• Odd one to put is that Chocobo Racing is fun. It's also fun against other players. It stops being fun when you realize you have to breed and level the chocobo repeatedly from the start to let it rank higher, especially when you want to get a max stat chocobo. Triple Triad can be fun, sometimes, and in the bi-weekly tournaments you can face people at the battle hall which were fun games against other players.

When I say raids, I don't just mean new ones. I mean old ones as well. There are now 69 Savage-level raids if you include coils, and similarly a lot of old extreme trials, so when someone is running a synced party for them I sometimes join in. Even if they are ones I cleared and farmed when they were current, it is nice to jump in and experience them again and teach others how to do them. A lot of people ignore this fact or pretend that nothing exists but the current tier, but that's not true, and the majority of people who play now did not when this content was current.

[VeyaAkemi]

There are now 69 Savage-level raids if you include coils

Nice. /10char