Now that my static has reached the point where we are starting to party in the likes of Wajaom Woodlands, Bhaflau Thickets, and Caedarva Mire — and our primary target is pink fluffy things, I am re-acquainted with some of the reasons why I dislike the Treasures of Aht Urghan expansion (ToAU).

While ToAU didn’t spawn the melee burn party, my premier bitch about ToAU is that it created an atmosphere where the primary style of party at the later levels is a melee burn.  I’m not a fan of any style of burn party (even when I was a dyed in the wool mage), but the current system bothers me in particular because it shuns most MP based jobs, and any down time is considered a sin.

My secondary beef with ToAU is that it’s removed camp diversity.  I’m in a static with 5 other players — yet we still must locate ourselves in a ToAU zone to attract the remaining player.  The mindset is that ToAU is an experience points express, and players are so attached to that notion that they’ll forego any XP gathered at a non-ToAU camp in hopes of getting a party at a ToAU camp.

It was nice to see a discussion crop up on a FFXI forum concerning this topic.

The discussion was centered around a suggestion of a game mechanic that “The Dark Ages of Camelot” used, where the zones received an XP modifier.  The base modifier is 1.000, and it is applied to the experienced earned per monster.  The more popular/crowded a zone is, the lower the XP modifier ( say a floor value of 0.750 ).   The less popular a camp, the higher the modifier ( say a ceiling value of 1.125 ).  My thinking on this is it seems a great way to even out XP earned by *burn camp sites and traditional-party camp sites as well as creating camp site diversity.  In fact I immediately entered a feature-request for this at the PlayOnline web site.

There were a few others that look at this simply as a nerf of the most efficient way to gather up experience.  For example this response:

…Non-meleeburn people are the ones who bitch and want nerf’s on ever damn thread. I have always said and stood behind play your way; it is not always going to be the most popular so you may have to work for it. Working for it is not bitching for a nerf and crying like emo kids.

I found a response to the anti-nerf crowd that really resonated with me:

Nerf is one way the system could be made fair, and the simplest. A system in which party styles are vastly imbalanced and in the dominant one THFs must struggle to use their JAs at all and can’t close skillchains, RDMs never get to enfeeble, WHMs are third choice for healing, BLMs can’t magic burst or even attempt to seek each other out lest they be invited to heal, PLDs can’t tank, BRDs can’t get a moment’s peace, SMNs can’t summon, BLUs can’t get parties at all, and sticking to a preference for wanting to do any of the above will get you no invites instead of an invite to a ghetto party isn’t what I’d call a fair system. I would be open to other ways to make the system fair — for instance, a parallel seek system so meleeburners don’t see non-meleeburn seekers and thus have no chance of assuming they’re doing them a favor by inviting them to a meleeburn.

As a Paladin, I now further myself by offing Toucan Sam’s wife.  Nerfing these zones by creating an XP bonus in less popular camps wouldn’t bother me in the least.