[Mhurron]

Originally Posted by skeeterlite

I can verify it being an issue I was kicked from a group for not having +mnd gear as a lvl 17 rdm.

I still don't know why I was kicked.

Because you didn't have MND gear, you said so yourself.

[Raydeus]

I seriously doubt someone would kick a RDM out of a party just because they don't have +MND gear. At that level sticking debuffs is fairly easy even without MND gear on, so it must've been something else. <_<;

Specially playing skill comes to mind.

[skeeterlite]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

I seriously doubt someone would kick a RDM out of a party just because they don't have +MND gear. At that level sticking debuffs is fairly easy even without MND gear on, so it must've been something else. <_<;

Specially playing skill comes to mind.

I can guarantee you playing skill is not an issue. These guys were just rude asses in general. I was kicked upon arrival - no mobs had been killed or pulled. It wasn't a total loss for me, as I made a new friend out of the ordeal and they are going to static with me when I start leveling whm up.
______________________________

Originally Posted by Mhurron

Because you didn't have MND gear, you said so yourself.

I'm new to the game - how the hell was I suppose to know a rdm needs mnd gear? Since then I have gotten a few pieces for a base of +4 gear and I have cooked 3 stacks of roast mushrooms for a total of +7mnd. I personally think the community of FFXI are elite assholes and right now I'm just rolling through the punches and finding a few folks here and there who are actually nice folks who can take a second or two to explain things to a new player.

[Raydeus]

Originally Posted by skeeterlite

I can guarantee you playing skill is not an issue. These guys were just rude asses in general. I was kicked upon arrival - no mobs had been killed or pulled. It wasn't a total loss for me, as I made a new friend out of the ordeal and they are going to static with me when I start leveling whm up.

Ah, in that case you were way better off not being in that party anyway. Plus soloing at that lvl I usually get more xp/hr than regular parties anyway, although duoing is the best xp by far.

Good thing you got something good out of it.

[Effedup]

Originally Posted by TheGrandMom

It's like a huge joke in our ls when they decide to level a low job. They nearly brag about how shitty their equips are and how funny it is. Then they complain about the nubs in their parties....ya riiiiiiiight

That's it exactly right there...how can people complain about others when they are wearing garbage? I mean, doesn't anyone have a sense of pride anymore, or is that strictly a 38-75 job trait? I worked my ass off farming and crafting when I started out to be able to afford those nice pieces of lowbie gear, because, especially at those levels, every little bit helps; I run low on inventory space, too, even with 4 mules...but I manage. It takes me 30 minutes or more sometimes to mule gear around to equip my main well...but I do it anyways because no matter what level I am, I want to be as good as I can possibly be. If everyone had that same sentiment, maybe the Dunes, Quiffim, or Kazham wouldn't be as broken as people CONSTANTLY bitch about. Any naked idiot can be PL'd, but it obviously takes someone with some modicum of skill to actually play without one.

If everyone is geared somewhat well, then the party as a whole can roll with the punches and make some real progress. If you're DDing, and your tank is having difficulties, if you're wearing decent defense gear you can pull hate for a moment and keep the party going. We all know that shit happens; it doesn't matter how good you are or how many trips you've made through the Dunes you're prolly going to die sometime. By going out to an exp camp wearing crap because you just don't want to take the time to gear up right, or don't feel like storing some of your high level armor for a night to clear up some inventory space, you're basically giving everyone in that party the finger. Would behavior like that be tolerated during endgame activities? Obviously not...so why do we tolerate it at the lowbie camps? Why does one have to be more important than the other? I assure you that the person that is getting out there for the FIRST time thinks it's important...

I realize I'm ranting, and our LS's standards obviously aren't shared by all...it just sucks that people that are just starting out probably aren't going to have the good experiences I did when I started because of how horribly indifferent people are getting sub-37. I've been playing for almost 3 years and I don't even have a 75 yet (my high job is 44), and it's hard getting parties out there at all, let alone decent ones, so this is something I deal with all the time, hence my strong feelings on the issue. Trying to level without a semi-static is damn near impossible anymore, but if everyone came together as a community it wouldn't have to be that way. Just wishful thinking on my part...and I just needed to vent. Hopefully some of you guys understand... ^^

By the way, I love that D2 suggestion, that never even occured to me. Nice quick way to get your point across...

[TheGrandMom]

Originally Posted by Effedup

That's it exactly right there...how can people complain about others when they are wearing garbage? I mean, doesn't anyone have a sense of pride anymore, or is that strictly a 38-75 job trait? I worked my ass off farming and crafting when I started out to be able to afford those nice pieces of lowbie gear, because, especially at those levels, every little bit helps; I run low on inventory space, too, even with 4 mules...but I manage. It takes me 30 minutes or more sometimes to mule gear around to equip my main well...but I do it anyways because no matter what level I am, I want to be as good as I can possibly be.

Exactly what I do too. Just started to level Sam in fact, took me the better part of an hour to track down all my equips between my mules and hubby's mules. It was worth it. One person in a party I got even /t'd me and thanked me for not coming half naked. I was a bit surprised but when I saw the whm in a level 1 tunica (well known level 75 elitest), I understood. (And I don't want to hear from people about how mages don't need to wear up to date equips. They draw hate too and get hit. They do need decent equips. This guy was level 26 for pete's sake!)

[Effedup]

Originally Posted by TheGrandMom

Exactly what I do too. Just started to level Sam in fact, took me the better part of an hour to track down all my equips between my mules and hubby's mules. It was worth it. One person in a party I got even /t'd me and thanked me for not coming half naked. I was a bit surprised but when I saw the whm in a level 1 tunica (well known level 75 elitest), I understood. (And I don't want to hear from people about how mages don't need to wear up to date equips. They draw hate too and get hit. They do need decent equips. This guy was level 26 for pete's sake!)

It's a nice feeling, isn't it? When someone /check's you and compliments you on your gears and thanks you for caring. I also get compliments myself from time to time, and it's nice when that time spent is acknowledged.

Good luck with your Sam, I just recently started levelling mine (I'm 19 as of now) and I'm really enjoying it. ^^

[Lunaryn]

Originally Posted by Karinya

The fish rots from the head down; exping rots from merit levels down. All those things are no longer necessary or even beneficial to a merit party. Spam rampage (or other multihit ws) and utsusemi and get more exp than you would with strategy and coordination. (If you did have a strategy, amnesia would probably wreck it anyway; but imps have such low defense and HP that killing imps with mindless zerging is still faster and gives more exp than killing tougher mobs with intelligence and coordination.) Who cares if you even have armor, you take 0 damage guaranteed with shadows up.

That doesn't actually work before level 74, but that doesn't stop people from trying it.

PLs have something to do with it too, allowing people to get away with and even level up in parties that a few years ago would have left them face down in the sand; there was a time when you needed some level of skill, coordination, and everyone doing their freaking job just to survive, but mostly, I blame ToAU.

Those are probably the most significant factors, though the general improvement in characters' power levels probably has a fair bit to do with it too.

When I first joined, PLs could be found in the dunes, but were rare in Qufim and unheard of in the jungles. The general attitude of the community toward them was that they were a degrading element, something that had the primary result of pushing the make-or-break point for players, skill- and intelligence-wise, out of the dunes and into Qufim. Very few PLs were willing to PL outside the dunes, but they persisted in the dunes because the experienced players coming back for low jobs hated the slow xp rate, frequency of death-causing accidents, etc. that tend to be par for the course in the dunes. Even though there were definitely "I want my XP now!" voices in favor of PLs, and some were reluctant to see a problem with them in the limited capacity in which they existed at the time, there was a distinct anti-PL sentiment among many in the community. PLs were a truly controversial phenomenon at the time, and many worried about the impact they'd have on the community overall.

It didn't take that long for PLs to start appearing in Qufim and the jungles, though. It seemed to follow a somewhat predictable set of stages. First, PLing became more usual in the dunes, to the point where a significant minority of parties had them. Qufim became the new make-or-break point, with many people learning things such as skillchains, hate management, proper healing, etc. for the first time in their low-20s, because learning such things had not been necessary in their PL'd parties. Eventually, Qufim became the same cesspool of incompetence that the experienced players so hated the dunes for being. More problems, more deaths, more frustration... and more PLs. Goblin Bounty Hunter was sort of the last nail in the coffin there, though PLs were already pretty common before that ill-planned anti-RMT measure made the most popular xp camps 15-25 no longer viable without a PL. (They did eventually scale back on the GBHs' levels to the point where they're in line with xp mobs of those areas, at least.)

Still, even with the progression of PLs into Qufim and the jungles, it was still unheard of for a long time for PLs to operate in higher-level xp camps. The community seemed to have decided that going past 30 crossed the line between low-level camps where help could be justified, and high-level camps where people needed to stand on their own.

This changed dramatically with the release of ToAU and the rise of meleeburn parties. When all existing 50+ xp camps were abandoned in the jump to the comparatively easy xp offered by ToAU camps, the line which delineated Dunes/Qufim/Jungles from Altepa/Garlaige/etc. faded quickly. All core zone xp sucked, all core zone xp camps were sub-par, and it was much easier for people to say "I shouldn't have to put up with this kind of xp rate. We need a PL to get xp efficiently."

I think the high rate of xp gain currently possible at the highest levels has warped players' understanding of xp gain generally, and made it difficult to accept or care about the nominal xp rates a party can achieve on its own in a "hard" camp, which by the modern definition is practically every xp camp before Wajaom Woodlands' Lesser Colibri.

The fact that tactics useful in lower level parties are useless in meripo is probably a significant contributing factor, but I think xp/hr expectations is at the heart of the attitudes prevalent throughout today's pre-50 parties.

Edit: Whoops, actually neglected to make my main point here.

When you combine three elements of the changes that occurred over the time I've watched the community, you can start to see the nature of the shift:

1) PCs are getting better gear, better boosts, xp boosting equipment, greater varieties of ways to xp. Generally speaking, XP is getting easier to acquire.

2) With the introduction of ToAU, party XP is done against much squishier mobs from about the 50s onward. This enhances the advantages from the first point.

3) The ubiquity of PLs in pre-ToAU camps removes much of the remaining challenge and hardship from xp gain at lower levels.

In short, the essence of the efficiency that the community strove for has changed. Originally, this game had a reputation of being the hardest, most solo-unfriendly, most cooperation-and-teamwork-requiring of any major MMORPG. Just getting to a level like 30 required a lot of effort, working with a lot of people, understanding how the game worked. Aside from anomalies like account-buyers or obvious RMT, in general the competence level of players went up significantly as levels rose. The community attributed this to the harsh realities of leveling causing those who don't learn the game well to find themselves unable to progress past the dunes or Qufim. A party demanded a lot from its members because it wanted to get good xp/hr, or at the very least avoid the deaths that would seriously harm it, and a party really did need to perform well to stand a chance in the harsh realities it was operating under.

At the moment, there's little impetus to perform all that well in a lot of circumstances, or to differentiate yourself. A PL has more impact on your xp rate at low levels than whether you can perform a skillchain. In places where mobs are plentiful, many have realized just how much better in xp/hr terms it is to pick off weak targets quickly rather than take a challenging mob. As leveling gets easier, what it takes to be efficient changes, as well as the particular ways in which efficiency matters.

With such a huge variety of sources of xp, I doubt Pandora's Box can be closed in this case. It wouldn't hurt to take a long, careful look at how xp rates and caps are set up, though, and try to at least even out the risk/reward ratio.

[IfritnoItazura]

Originally Posted by Lunaryn

Very few PLs were willing to PL outside the dunes, but they persisted in the dunes because the experienced players coming back for low jobs hated the slow xp rate, frequency of death-causing accidents, etc. that tend to be par for the course in the dunes. Even though there were definitely "I want my XP now!" voices in favor of PLs, and some were reluctant to see a problem with them in the limited capacity in which they existed at the time, there was a distinct anti-PL sentiment among many in the community. PLs were a truly controversial phenomenon at the time, and many worried about the impact they'd have on the community overall.

[ ... ]

Eventually, Qufim became the same cesspool of incompetence that the experienced players so hated the dunes for being. More problems, more deaths, more frustration... and more PLs.

Last time I PL'ed a friend in Valkurm Dunes, not a single WAR or /WAR seeking, so no tanks. Only my friend on RDM, and one other RDM could qualify as a healer--but we lacked DDs. So, both RDMs were used as DDs.

That was the case for 3 hours.

PL was pretty much the only way to make reasonable progress--it's not all about dumbing down the standards, I think. Practically forced me to reevaluate the value of PL--it really is the best thing I can do for friends who wish to level a new job. =/

[Saren]

I hate to say it but I'm less anti PL at low level than I used to be. I do a fair amount of PLing where I go along to be there for emergencies only. If there is a whm in the party I ask them, in tell, if they want me to proper PL or be there for if something goes really wrong so they get the choice of how much I'm doing because it's only fair to do it that way.

Even with dancer etc it's very difficult to get very low level parties with enough of the roles covered to work, what Itazura described seems to be fairly common and I HATE how little trouble most people (especially people with multiple 75s) take with their gear. The reason they insist on a PL is because an IT can 1/2 shot them on a normal hit.

The one that really pissed me off was taking my ninja to Qufim. I went to town on ninja, shuriken the works so I dropped about 80k on tools/food/etc before I went to this party. My party had me and war/mnk so there should have been someone to voke off me to let me get shadows back up right?

The war refused to provoke period (the damage he took when he was hit was terrifying but I was pissed already with him and didn't want to make it worse by seeing how bad his gear really was) and refused to use anything but scyth or greatsword. When I questioned him about it I got the 'it's just a subjob' and 'I have a job at 75, my inventory space is really limited!!!!' excuses. I solo tanked pretty well I think for a level 20-25 ninja but I was so pissed off by the time I left that party.

The only time I've booted someone from a party for their gear and setup was a level 16ish thf/nin with an aspir knife, a 600 delay gun and level 7 gear on. I try not to be too elitist about gear but that was just ridiculous. That knife isn't only completely unhelpful for thf, it's exclusive which means he went out of his way to kill an NM in an area where he could have easily farmed at least 5k in the time it took him to kill that NM and bought a semi decent knife.

[Karinya]

Originally Posted by Lunaryn

Those are probably the most significant factors, though the general improvement in characters' power levels probably has a fair bit to do with it too.

When I first joined, PLs could be found in the dunes, but were rare in Qufim and unheard of in the jungles. The general attitude of the community toward them was that they were a degrading element, something that had the primary result of pushing the make-or-break point for players, skill- and intelligence-wise, out of the dunes and into Qufim. Very few PLs were willing to PL outside the dunes, but they persisted in the dunes because the experienced players coming back for low jobs hated the slow xp rate, frequency of death-causing accidents, etc. that tend to be par for the course in the dunes. Even though there were definitely "I want my XP now!" voices in favor of PLs, and some were reluctant to see a problem with them in the limited capacity in which they existed at the time, there was a distinct anti-PL sentiment among many in the community. PLs were a truly controversial phenomenon at the time, and many worried about the impact they'd have on the community overall.

I was one of them. We were right, weren't we? People who don't have the skill, gear, and cooperation necessary to succeed in Valkurm *deserve* to fail in Valkurm, so that they can learn from their failure and improve their skills until they succeed.

Valkurm isn't hard. But it sets a minimum bar that if you can't even get over *that*, maybe you should look into a game more suited to your ability, like tic-tac-toe. Or you could just whine for someone to *make* you succeed no matter how hard you're failing on your own ability.

It didn't take that long for PLs to start appearing in Qufim and the jungles, though. It seemed to follow a somewhat predictable set of stages. First, PLing became more usual in the dunes, to the point where a significant minority of parties had them. Qufim became the new make-or-break point, with many people learning things such as skillchains, hate management, proper healing, etc. for the first time in their low-20s, because learning such things had not been necessary in their PL'd parties. Eventually, Qufim became the same cesspool of incompetence that the experienced players so hated the dunes for being. More problems, more deaths, more frustration... and more PLs. Goblin Bounty Hunter was sort of the last nail in the coffin there, though PLs were already pretty common before that ill-planned anti-RMT measure made the most popular xp camps 15-25 no longer viable without a PL. (They did eventually scale back on the GBHs' levels to the point where they're in line with xp mobs of those areas, at least.)

I think you're exaggerating the impact of the GBHs. You can't camp *in* the water in Valk, but you can still camp near it and pull all the fish you want. Qufim cliff camp was the hardest hit, but it was never as popular as the lake and tower anyway. The lake GBH is EP to a 20 - I used to solo it while lfp, it's almost completely negligible to a party. If it aggros you kill it and keep going.

Still, even with the progression of PLs into Qufim and the jungles, it was still unheard of for a long time for PLs to operate in higher-level xp camps. The community seemed to have decided that going past 30 crossed the line between low-level camps where help could be justified, and high-level camps where people needed to stand on their own.

This changed dramatically with the release of ToAU and the rise of meleeburn parties. When all existing 50+ xp camps were abandoned in the jump to the comparatively easy xp offered by ToAU camps, the line which delineated Dunes/Qufim/Jungles from Altepa/Garlaige/etc. faded quickly. All core zone xp sucked, all core zone xp camps were sub-par, and it was much easier for people to say "I shouldn't have to put up with this kind of xp rate. We need a PL to get xp efficiently."

I think the high rate of xp gain currently possible at the highest levels has warped players' understanding of xp gain generally, and made it difficult to accept or care about the nominal xp rates a party can achieve on its own in a "hard" camp, which by the modern definition is practically every xp camp before Wajaom Woodlands' Lesser Colibri.

Heh. You kids these days don't know a hard camp when it kicks you in the ass. Let me tell you about Valley of Sorrows... :D

The fact that tactics useful in lower level parties are useless in meripo is probably a significant contributing factor, but I think xp/hr expectations is at the heart of the attitudes prevalent throughout today's pre-50 parties.

I suppose that's probably a factor too. But that doesn't explain why people are *more* willing to go half-assed when they think the exp they are already getting stinks.

Edit: Whoops, actually neglected to make my main point here.

When you combine three elements of the changes that occurred over the time I've watched the community, you can start to see the nature of the shift:

1) PCs are getting better gear, better boosts, xp boosting equipment, greater varieties of ways to xp. Generally speaking, XP is getting easier to acquire.

It's not just XP - HNMs are getting easier too. It's a serious problem that SE needs to do something about before the whole game slides into trivialization. (Or maybe that's their devious master plan to capture WoW's audience.)

2) With the introduction of ToAU, party XP is done against much squishier mobs from about the 50s onward. This enhances the advantages from the first point.

3) The ubiquity of PLs in pre-ToAU camps removes much of the remaining challenge and hardship from xp gain at lower levels.

In short, the essence of the efficiency that the community strove for has changed. Originally, this game had a reputation of being the hardest, most solo-unfriendly, most cooperation-and-teamwork-requiring of any major MMORPG.

And we liked it that way!

No, really, I *did* like it that way. I played in the WoW beta and if you think Valkurm has idiots, you haven't seen WoW grouping content. The thing about solo friendly MMOs is that you can get to an arbitrarily high level and still have *no freaking idea* what a tank is, or why there should be only one puller, or even the most basic aspects of teamwork - never mind how to set up SATA or perform a skillchain or pull mobs in the correct order to get the most out of your exp chain.

Just getting to a level like 30 required a lot of effort, working with a lot of people, understanding how the game worked.

And this figured into the design of advanced jobs - you needed level 30 because in SE's mind, that guaranteed that you would have some idea how the game worked before trying to play a job like NIN, SMN, or RNG.

Aside from anomalies like account-buyers or obvious RMT, in general the competence level of players went up significantly as levels rose. The community attributed this to the harsh realities of leveling causing those who don't learn the game well to find themselves unable to progress past the dunes or Qufim. A party demanded a lot from its members because it wanted to get good xp/hr, or at the very least avoid the deaths that would seriously harm it, and a party really did need to perform well to stand a chance in the harsh realities it was operating under.

At the moment, there's little impetus to perform all that well in a lot of circumstances, or to differentiate yourself. A PL has more impact on your xp rate at low levels than whether you can perform a skillchain. In places where mobs are plentiful, many have realized just how much better in xp/hr terms it is to pick off weak targets quickly rather than take a challenging mob. As leveling gets easier, what it takes to be efficient changes, as well as the particular ways in which efficiency matters.

With such a huge variety of sources of xp, I doubt Pandora's Box can be closed in this case. It wouldn't hurt to take a long, careful look at how xp rates and caps are set up, though, and try to at least even out the risk/reward ratio.

Overall, an excellent post. However, I disagree with the last paragraph. I think a few simple reforms could go a long way.

1. Beef up the most frequently abused monster families, imps and colibri. It's obvious that they are nowhere near the challenge of another mob family of the same nominal level. More HP would be a simple starting point - all other things being equal, a mob with more HP takes longer to kill, which means you kill fewer of them in an hour and so get less exp, perhaps more in line with hunting another type of monster. Since exp value is determined principally by level, players will tend to seek out the weakest-for-their-level monsters they can find (this is why crabs were so common for so long; if you have a dispeller, crabs are nearly completely harmless), which should be countered by making monster families as nearly equal in difficulty as possible so that a variety of monster families (and therefore camps) are about equally desirable.

2. Currently there are no new exp tables for players above level 65, even though the realities of exp obviously change a lot with the introduction of high level WS, people able to use their endgame gear in exp, and perhaps most importantly, merits. New exp tables that weaken the exp value of low-relative-level mobs would balance the rewards better between massacres of the helpless (read: practically all high level exp today) and taking down fewer tougher mobs (the old moongate/Kuftal/Uleg/etc. style).

3. If spells from outside the party are cast on you *during* a fight, the caster should count as a party member for determining exp for that fight. This would drastically reduce the ways PLs can improve your exp (basically only by add/crisis control, raises you don't have to shout/wait for, and reducing your downtime by healing between fights). Anyone who's genuinely pissed at the occasional loss of exp from random people drive-by curing/buffing them can turn on /blockaid. PLs as a kind of disaster insurance or even downtime reduction aren't so bad, but when people rely on them to even win the fight in the first place, it defies logic for them not to count as a party member (when they were the freaking tank!); worse, it enables precisely the kind of half-assed "it's all cool, we have a PL" play that is now so widespread. (Or worse, asking the pld not to voke and the whm not to heal.)

4. Destroy infinite chain. It makes for funny screenshots, but it's nowhere near balanced. Either put a hard cap on chain number, or make chain timers continue to shorten (#6 is half of #5, #7 is 1/3, #8 is 1/4, etc...) until eventually they reach an amount so absurdly short that nobody can keep it up.

Let me be perfectly clear about this: I want to bring back the days when you bring decent gear, skill and coordination to your party or you die; when the difference between a good party and a bad party is who is making positive exp/hr and who spends half the hour shouting for raises. I think there's nothing wrong with a skilled party being able to make somewhat faster exp than in the past (thus exp rings, for example, are harmless: they only help you make exp if you're already making exp), but ToAU has (unintentionally?) dumbed down exp to the point that half-assed and poorly constructed parties with no tactics can still succeed when they ought to be failing hard. That's what I'm trying to reverse and bring back the days when FFXI's gameplay set it apart from other MMOs. Restricting the usefulness of PLs (see #3 above) is a necessary step to keep people from relying on them as crutches.

[TheGrandMom]

Originally Posted by Saren

The only time I've booted someone from a party for their gear and setup was a level 16ish thf/nin with an aspir knife, a 600 delay gun and level 7 gear on. I try not to be too elitist about gear but that was just ridiculous. That knife isn't only completely unhelpful for thf, it's exclusive which means he went out of his way to kill an NM in an area where he could have easily farmed at least 5k in the time it took him to kill that NM and bought a semi decent knife.

Ditto on the "too elitest" comment. I rarely check anyone. (Just a person thing.) But if I'm party lead and someone comes the the party and I get a /t "OMG check the <person>'s equips!" or I am leary myself, then I will /check them. If I see someone coming to the party with gear that is ridiculous (like a lvl1 body on a lvl 26 whm), they are so outta there! I don't care if I have to disband the party/log off/seek, I will not party with people who blatantly are doing the most minimal to get by. I wish more people did that too.

I've been kicked from parties myself. WAY back in the day I didn't have a life belt. This was when the coffers were so overcamped by thieves it was damn near impossible to get. (And yes I tried many many times.) I was farming and saving for one but they were freakin expensive and making gil farming was slow and painful. Any party I got, in that timeframe, kicked me when they saw I didn't have the belt.

[Aksannyi]

^^ See now that's just stupid. If you're making an effort and your other gear is pretty good, why worry about it so much? On the contrary, my WAR is 60 without a Hauby, and it's staying that way (60) until I get one. Would people kick me without one? Some might, and some might not. When I dinged 59 I did not have one with me, and I was xping with friends so they didn't care, and I finished to 60 on Campaign just to get to 60. But personally I try not to level without gear that's necessary for my job. Hauby = important. Belt? Maybe not so much. Especially in a situation where they're hard to get. Remember astrals back in the day? Same thing. If you had one, awesome, but it's nowhere near a requirement.

As far as the PLing thing goes, I just deal with it anymore. 9/10 in the Dunes we can't find a healer anyway, and someone always comes with a PL. Without fail. People dual box their friends if they have to. It speeds thngs up, and I'm fine with that. Dunes = suck. I'm content to be done with it ASAP.

[Pteryx]

Originally Posted by Lunaryn

3) The ubiquity of PLs in pre-ToAU camps removes much of the remaining challenge and hardship from xp gain at lower levels.

It's worth adding that for me, Campaign Operations tend to act in part as a sort of "patch" for the problem of having to deal with complete idiots at lower levels -- but at the same time, they also leave me concerned that some players, somewhere, are using them to completely avoid learning anything about their jobs at all, especially if they're "just subs". Heck, even one friend of yours and mine seems to resent being pulled out to actually play on his Ninja once in a while rather than just filling his XP bar up with ops, even though it serves to get him skillups. -- Pteryx

[kaibelf]

Originally Posted by Pteryx

It's worth adding that for me, Campaign Operations tend to act in part as a sort of "patch" for the problem of having to deal with complete idiots at lower levels -- but at the same time, they also leave me concerned that some players, somewhere, are using them to completely avoid learning anything about their jobs at all, especially if they're "just subs". Heck, even one friend of yours and mine seems to resent being pulled out to actually play on his Ninja once in a while rather than just filling his XP bar up with ops, even though it serves to get him skillups. -- Pteryx

I hear that they are revamping campaign to make this impossible now. It should be a nice change since far too many people so just hang out for no reason. The thing that pisses me off the most is not that they are using it to get some exp by standing around and buffing, but that one can die RIGHT IN FRONT of them, and they will continue to barfira for 20 minutes without raising you even though they are in absolutely no danger.

They can suck at playing all they want, but a little courtesy for those who are putting in SOME effort to defend an area would be a delight.