GrindingFollow

I'm kind of hoping for the normal mode of leveling to resemble Besieged or Campaign (although I quit before that was implemented... sounds great though, and I almost came back just for it).

Really, I mainly want to heal (at least for a while), and I'd prefer to just kind of wander into a free-for-all and help out whomever looks like they need it the most. I never leveled WHM past 37, so I didn't get to try it out in Besieged. I guess I just got all the melee out of my system in XI, so now I want to heal, nuke, and maybe buff... Seems like all that would be pretty fun in a larger-scale battle where I'm not stuck with the same 5 people at all times.

That would make me happy pants.

Ragnarok Online's fighting while traveling was a lot better than the camping style of FFXI. It felt very explorative.

Running around the map, fighting things as you go. Particularly enjoyable when you were fighting things that took a minute or so to kill, so you were having to be careful not to aggro anything else or you'd get eaten alive.

Edited, Jul 2nd 2009 8:06pm by Karelyn

Um, not really. I assume you never did higher level EXP parties in FFXI. You typically did groups of 3-4 people, and you had to work together. If one person went off on their own, they would die and the entire party would wipe. You had to protect each other's backs in order not to die.

There was a ton of teamwork, and it was really social; likewise, you weren't killing things randomly, you were focus attacking single targets, just like in FFXI.

But you were traveling through the map as you did so, instead of sitting in a camp. This was more due to the way monsters spawned in Ragnarok Online. Due to the way spawning worked in that game, it would make camping a very poor way to gain EXP.

EDIT: Private Servers for Ragnarok Online, due to frequently having heavy multiplers on EXP, often wound up with people not ever doing EXP parties, so if you played on a Ragnarok Online Private Server, you may have no idea what I was talking about. In the official servers, you eventually reached the point where it was significantly less efficient (And hell, less fun), to try and level without a party.

EDIT EDIT: Part of why EXP Parties were hell-o-alotta fun in Ragnarok Online, was due to the greater ease of building a party. You didn't need a rigid structure to build a strong party. Every class had abilities to bring to a group, and almost any combination of 3-4 classes could party well together, even if they did not have a healer in the group. This made finding and making groups very easy, and a lot of fun.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: I <3 RO, really do. I miss it :(

Edited, Jul 2nd 2009 8:52pm by Karelyn

There's no reason the game can't be designed to allow groups to travel around and kill things together. It would still team work, coordination and everyone knowing their job/role. We just wouldn't be stuck standing in the same place all the time. Mobility is fun. Exploration is fun. Camping is boring.



Variety is the spice of life, right?

I liked the idea of having an camp compared to just running around and killing stuff. In ffxi there was a few camps where you ran around (like weapons in sky back before the expansions and stuff) and it was ok, but I just personally like a camp better. I liked the feeling of getting to a place, settling in and getting comfortable. In a camp even tho the party lasted hours upon hours, at least you didn't have to be in full attention mode, you could do other things and party effectively (at least I could, some people can't multitask). With a constant moving theme all the time, you would have to be locked in all the time or be left way behind. Also with all the brbs and stuff in a party, at least you didn't risk losing and leaving people behind because 1 person said brb and the party wanted to keep killing. The camp way, a person can say brb and you could continue killing (at the same pace, or close to it) without the risk of leaving a party member behind just because he had to use the bathroom or something.

The camp style is something SE might consider for FFXIV. It's also exceptionally dull and doesn't fit with the notion of groups fighting multiple mobs simultaneously. If you're in a group of six and you are routinely fighting 4-6+ mobs at a time, unless those mobs always come in paced/triggered waves, you're quite often better off bringing the group to the mobs instead of bringing the mobs to the group. The camp style in FFXI was a benefit to the casters who could rest and regen mana while the puller was out grabbing the next mob. There are ways to tune a game so that that sort of fight -> rest -> fight -> rest pattern is unnecessary.

In content tuned to be manageable in 1-2 hour chunks, I don't think that expecting people to remain focused on the objectives of the party is unrealistic. I can see how the option to take a more casual approach to team play would be a benefit if you're looking at a four hour xp session. In a one hour group activity, keeping on task and up to speed with the party is a reasonable request to make of each player; ideally, if they're not able to focus for that long they ought not to have joined the group in the first place.

Unfortunately, you've gone and contradicted yourself. On one hand, you herald the benefits of camps because they allow you to multitask and focus your attention on things other than what is going on in the party, which is not something you can do in a roaming party. Then you suggest that roaming parties require less teamwork. I think a huge part of teamwork is everyone making an equal effort, not just 5 people hanging around in a rocky alcove spamming emotes and goofing around while the puller is out cruising for the next juicy xp mob.

I think you're thinking from an exclusively FFXI perspective. Other MMOs provide a better platform for demonstrating how multiple mob combat could be implemented. SE might do something entirely different from what has been done in other MMOs, but it's a safe bet it's not going to be move -> camp for '20-30' minutes while fighting off waves of mobs -> move again -> camp again -> repeat. That might comprise a part of the group content. I'd be surprised and disappointed if it represented in any way the majority of group content.

They never said that this was going to be done Solo.

Maybe that's the difference between a party and solo-play, you can take multiples at once.