Yes, nice kneejerk reaction there. Would be glad to be in a FC with you. Talk about taking the other side of the extreme.
In 14 1.0 you only had linkshells, and those had to take the part of guilds. Here, you have linkshells and FC. But what good is a FC where members share bank gil, items and buffs, if you can't trust your members or if it's so overblown that nobody feels responsible for anything your members do?
"Here, let's invite as many people as possible but if anyone wants anything from us, eh, take it to the duty finder."
My FC is 30 men strong, and of course nobody is on all the time, but if someone needs help we arrange stuff to help him progress.
I know all of this responsibility or actual sense of player solidarity goes out of the window by having this duty finder, but is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Not everyone is a good person and a lot of people are selfish. Anyways, it's all about trust, really. I don't believe FC's hinder anything, and it made sense to have linkshells and guilds separate since some people just only want to chat and others want a mix of both or purely one thing. Linkshells also don't carry the responsibility of a FC since you can only be in one at a time unlike Linkshells where you can be in many.
So I decided to buy this game, since I have some nice memories of playing FFXI (my first MMORPG) and nothing really else to play at the moment.
I'm about three hours in so far and I really don't like it.
I'm playing a Conjurer (level 8 currently) and so far the game has been pathetically easy. You can basically spam the same attack again and again without any need to ever use Cure/healing items or even look at your MP bar, since MP recovery is so fast you basically have endless MP.
Also you don't even need to think about your surroundings. Monsters who are nearby almost never attack you, unless you attack first. Even if you are in the middle of like five enemies of the same type and you start attacking one, the other four will just sit there and do nothing.
Is the whole game like this or does it get significantly harder? At which level is it normal to start playing in a party? And do you even need a party or can you also solo through the whole game?
From someone that has over 200 days worth of in-game time on FFXI and who stopped playing it just a few months ago, this isn't FFXI, and I ended up liking the game because it wasn't. Here's a video of me doing the end-game boss of Voidwatch.
Provenance Watcher Kill on Asura FFXI
In FFXI, what was considered challenging was
1. Pure time consumption. Traveling anywhere, Japanese midnight waits to pad storylines, tons of level caps that required you to have people almost twice your life of a good ways higher than you to complete
for you.
2. Waiting forever to get into a party depending on your job.
3. Getting in parties was a nuisance and required hours of sitting one good spot instead of being able to adventure and do things all over. This was only recent remedied when they added Abyssea and Bookburns. It still, however, kept you in one general area just to level.
Now at first, I had your reaction to not being in parties in the same way as FFXI, but I ended up liking this way as it let me play on my time and not others. You can actually play in EXP parties, they're called FATE parties where you do FATEs in a party and exp more efficiently since you're in a group and getting Gold happens easier.
As for the surroundings, you're in the beginner area. Enemies start aggroing, but you don't have to zone to escape them. (which was just a waste time of time really)
Also, enemies DO link in this, I think when you're low level they don't due to the games design. If I go attack a Ladybug as level 49 Dragoon they all attack me in a horde with the squirrels lol.
Yes, the game does get more challenging as you do the story mode. There are actually people complaining the game is too hard (the Primals where you fight the summons).
I do like FFXI, but this is just a different game, and in some ways, it's a lot more quality of life.