Party

A Party in Final Fantasy XI refers to any number of characters between two and six members, one of whom is the leader of this organization. This organization is typically temporary, but players occasionally form bonds of friendship and create static parties. There is no official in game term for this, this is a player-coined definition for people who commonly party together.

Parties form in the game to do various quests, missions, or to experience when multiple members would fair better collectively or have more fun than they would trying to do any one of those things by themselves. Parties appear on the screen in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The players name who is viewing the list will always appear on top and then the party members appear in the order they joined. The list includes names and the HP and MP of all members. The leader of the party always has a yellow dot before his name.

Since the game is centered on parties, there are certain (positive) spells that can only affect other party members. These spells or abilities include; Bard Songs, Regen spells, Refresh spells, Sneak, Invisible, or Deodorize. The one exception to this rule is Ballista, a form of Conflict, where those spells can affect anyone on the same team.

Alliances
An Alliance is a group of two or three parties that band together to do even larger, more difficult quests generally. It is possible to form an alliance to try to get experience points, but in general this does not happen because of how experience is calculated. There are encounters that are too difficult for just one party. Often these include high level notorious monsters, certain burning circle fights, and quests that a high number of people want to complete together.

As far as how they are displayed, the additional two parties are displayed starting in the upper right hand corner of the screen. If there are two, the second party will be placed under the first. The alliance leader is given an additional white dot next to his yellow dot for being a party leader.

Spells that do not work for players outside of their own party do not work on players who are in other parties within alliances.