Final Fantasy XIV Producer Discusses the Duty Finder and the Community, Denies Same-Server Matching

In every MMORPG there’s a rather reactionary area of the community that tries to resist change, and especially during betas gets very vocal against anything that could be seen as a feature that makes a game less of a chore. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn's Duty finder is one of those features, and Naoki Yoshida explained in depth the philosophy behind it.

[Dno]

good faster parties the better. People will actually do the content unlike ff11 where a select few were able to do anything.

[Firan]

I never want to see that (!) above my head again.

[ScubbaSteve]

It's a mixed bag in games like these. Nobody wants to wait hours to find a party for a dungeon, but at the same time you'll never see the people you play with again. Community is what MMOs thrive on, if you are constantly grouping with randoms from other servers you won't find as many friends on your server.

When devs combine this with making a string of solo quests the primary means of xp they often fall into the trappings of the modern day mmo. The games don't last long because nobody is forming groups. Developers are forgetting the genre is "Massively Multiplayer".

[Dno]

im sorry I heard that argument a billion times and I gotta say that's bullshit. I played ff11 for 6 years and only a handful of times did I actually make a long lasting friend from a party killing crabs for hours.

What did end up happening was I was seeking for 4 hours then once we got there someone had to leave and party disbanded. I have RL friends in the game and theres so much content you can to do to make friends like free companies and linkshells and the housing system which looks pretty cool.

No one is forgetting anything but players who don't want to move on from these rose colored glasses of games that were cool when we were 12 but make no sense anymore.

But in any case id rather be able to do content and make 1 or 2 less friends over the life of a game then not do any content at all which is what happened to lots of people in ff11 which is why that game never once had over 500k subs and now it has less then 200k compared to WoW a game with content finder with over 10 million subs. I man the people have spoken on this one.

[3-4-5]

Any game always lasts longer because of groups.

Look at CS & COD, people form teams and stay together and form communities within those teams and it helps keep the game lasting for years where it otherwise would have died.

If it's MMO....it better be as multiplayer as possible.

[Nevers]

Been on the PS3 Beta since we were allowed in and, personally, I LOVE the Duty Finder. It'd be nice to have the option to pull from your own server (for community building) but it's not necessary.

[dendenmooshi]

Duty finder is great (the people that it finds is a different story though).

The reasons given for denying same-server matching is acceptable. It would complicate the algorithm and exclude healers (the group limiting class) from the matchmaking process even more. I would love to have it, but the community still has the ability to make parties on their own.