Last night just felt rightFollow

I don't want to make this into a long and drawn out post, but I just have to say that last night with the launch of 2.1 the game just felt magical. Everything that this game and community has been missing was back last night, even if it was just for one night. After logging in I ran Pharos Sirius and Hakkue Manor HM.

The beauty was that this was the first time that my DF group had ever ran those dungeons. There was so SR, no cookie-cutter standardized strategy that everyone had to abide by, no callous judgement for mistakes, and no dungeon rushing in total silence. It was so nice to be able to feel apart of a fellowship through the DF. We talked to each other the whole run, strategized, took our licks in stride, and did everything in our power to help each other out. Then once we had conquered the dungeon, none of us rushed off into the portal before saying goodbye. We took the time to thank each other and to talk more about the dungeon. It was just quality friendly fun and I loved every second of it.

I am not foolish enough to think that this feeling will last, but I cherished the magic while it lasted. Reflecting upon last night it made me wonder, would MMO's be better off if instanced dungeons and even boss battles were more randomized and aspects of them changed every run? This would kill SR's and cookie cutter strategies and just make the dungeons into a battle groun where a group of adventurers are just trying to make it happen the best way they can on pure instinct and experience.

Nyzul Isle in FFXI was a randomed "tower" - 100 floors, each one different every time. Normal mode had you try to climb five floors in 30 minutes (a few less realistically due to loading times, buff times, etc.) Puzzle floors were mixed in with kill all trash mob floors, secret NM floors, mega boss floors, and all of them were randomly created mazes with no maps. There were boss levels every 20 floors. Climb the tower once and lock in your 100th floor, so you could jump to floor 95 and fight the boss every time if you made it to 100. Hard mode randomized the floor jumps from increments of 1 to increments of 1 OR 2-11, and then had you try to climb all 100 floors in 30 minutes. Hard, but fun, and required a great deal of luck (more than a single 2 floor jump would ruin a run.)

Nyzul Isle and Neo Nyzul Isle still counts as some of my favorite content in FFXI, even if the gear is long since obsolete. You needed to stock up 150,000 NI points for a mythic weapon, too, so there was a reason for groups to continue to run the content even without needing the gear.

Edited, Dec 17th 2013 10:56pm by Catwho

Those Dark Cloud games are some of my absolute favorites.

Beating Dark Cloud 2 is the only time I've ever been emotional about finishing a game because I didn't want it to end. I had done everything you could do in the game. Really wish they'd dust it off and give us another.

Grumpy cat would like to weigh in.

I noticed players are hanging out just a moment or two longer after the final battles to see if they will get a commendation. I give one everyone time. Theres usually a /bow or /salute shared. It really adds to the feeling that you just had fun with friends even if you likely won't ever see them again.

Really not a whole lot of point doing speed runs now seeing as you get 70/90 Myth from High Level roulette. Even an average speed WP is going to get you 70 tomes in 20-25 minutes.

My conclusion is that the people persisting with WP SR are at the same time incredibly tedious, and incredibly boring. There are now far more ways to cap out your myth in around the same time frame, and they are way more fun than spamming the same dungeon 6-7 times.