Parties

Idle sims look for company. Most of the time that means a farming party: a few of them of a similar level who walk to a camp together and work it as a unit, focusing their attacks on the same target instead of each pulling something separate.

A party will not leave without a healer

This is the one hard requirement, and it is the reason a lot of attempts quietly fail. Healers are about a quarter of the population, so they are the piece everyone is waiting on — exactly as they are in any group game.

Two consequences you can actually see:

• Healers go looking for a group three times as often as anyone else. They are bad at fighting alone and they are the class every party wants, so the incentive points the way it points for a real player.
• Parties are often smaller than intended. A party rolls for a size between two and eight and then fills with whoever happens to be free. One that wanted seven and found three departs with three. Nobody stands around waiting for a perfect group.

A tank is preferred if one is spare. Everything after that is whoever was nearby.

A party multiplies experience, it does not split it

This surprises people, and it is the whole reason grouping is worth it.

Each member of a party is granted a full kill, priced off their own level, and then charged a small percentage for group size and level spread. Four sims killing one monster take home roughly 3.9 times what one sim would.

So a healer earns a near-full share of every kill it kept the party alive to make. Under a split that would be charity; under the real rule, grouping is simply the fastest way for a healer to level — and it is the same rule you play under.

Who is recruitable

Anyone not currently busy. A sim farming a camp alone will happily abandon it to join a group — that is the most ordinary social act in the game. What one will not do is walk away in the middle of a fight, and a sim that has agreed to fight alongside a player (see beckoning) is left alone entirely, because it already has somewhere better to be.

War parties are different

A hunting party is not a farming party that changed its mind. It forms for a reason, it recruits guild-mates rather than whoever is nearby, and it does not care about the level spread.

See war and vengeance.