Are you, guys, serious? NCsoft made party 9/9 for reasons. It was always 9 people full party back in the day. Before shitty update... Everyone one was upset when it came out, coz they had to dismiss 2 members from their party. Parties became weaker. Obviously, possibilities of 9 people is way more higher than of 7 people. You can farm more mobs, you can DPS more. Dont you understand, that the party is a unit. Unit becomes weaker when its not full, and when I say full I mean 9 ppl, not 7. Another point of view on the problem is a simple math. Basically, 5 parties with 7/7 is 35 people, when with 9/9 its 45. We have 5 parties that missing 10 people. It's not that hard to imagine how much weaker they are. So to compinsate that loss you need to gather more parties. More parties=Harder to organize. If you still dont find 7/7 worse than 9/9, we can go even more deeper into the problem. It becomes clear that party lose much of efficiency. For example, you have one party that have warcryer/sws/bd/bishop. That means you have a party that consists on 4/7 of supports and 3/7 dds. When with the 9/9 its 4/9 supps and 5/9 dds. 3 dds vs 5 dds. 5 dds have 40% more damage if you do math. You have more than one supp on one dd. So if you apply this on a whole server there must be more supports than dds on a server. But it's conversely, there are more dds, but they cant fit in, coz there's no room for them in a party. Hence, two poor dds always aside somewhere. 7/7: 5 parties = 35 people = 20 supps / 15 dds = 60% DPS 9/9: 5 parties = 45 people = 20 supps / 25 dds = 100% DPS Of course you dont feel 7/7 bad, coz you either solo player, either less than [paste lvl here] that can easily farm with 60% dps coz mobs are weak.