[crossfire] Party Support

[Mark Wedel]

  The definition of what is a playable class is very broad.

  A class that can only gain exp as part of a party is still quite playable, if 
you are always able to play with parties.

  A pure weapon smith class may also be very playable - not even needing party 
support, just cooperation of other players to bring in materials, give payment 
for stuff, whatever.

  Now, I probably wouldn't want to play such a character, but there are people 
that do.  So I don't think that the ability to play such characters should not 
be there because some people don't find it interesting.

  It may be that character creation should be redone (as has been suggested) - 
but a basic change could be that only easily playable classes be presented to 
the player, unless they select expert/advanced mode or something.

  And I'll restate my original belief:
We don't need to fix the party system right now - I think there will be many 
other changes done that will affect party playability in various ways.  However, 
in all those other changes, we should keep in mind how it may affect party play 
- we shouldn't just dimiss party play as something we don't care about.

  Now I'll add to that:  It may be that some of those changes don't improve 
party play in any regard, or doing party support for some change isn't feasible. 
  But we should still think about that for other changes.