ShindaUsagi wrote:
My problem is things like DF are meant to BUILD community. Hopping around from MMO to MMO with your "friends" is all fine and dandy but it's actually isolating 'community'. I have the foreboding impression that mine is an unpopular opinion but I stick to it. "Join a FC" is not an excuse to be selfish amongst strangers and peers.
This genre used to have a lot more tact.
I agree with your sentiment quite strongly, but I don't think that cross-server auto-group systems are designed to
build community -- quite the opposite -- they're designed explicitly to
circumvent it. I've been saying it since this duty finder was announced: systems like this are designed for efficiency and they sacrifice all meaningful, long-term interaction with others to do so. One can suddenly party with strangers from another realm, perform as badly as one pleases, take everything for oneself, clear the dungeon, and repeat the process instantly. Without any need for it, a community ceases to exist.
Ironically, most everyone touted this duty finding system as an end to long wait times, citing their experiences with FFXI as proof of the failure of a party-based system with one's own server population. Well, now the DF has come and DDs still face long wait times, on one hand, but also rude, apathetic players on the other. You're lucky to receive so much as an emote from another person in these situations.
Ultimately you can't have both a community and a system of anonymous cross-server grouping. Such a system could have worked for PvP, but it pulls the guts from PvE content. The closest thing to community interaction FFXIV will ever have will come in the form of casual chat with one's company or linkshell, in the form of brief mercantile trades between a gatherer and a crafter.