MSQ teleports - A simple band-aid for discouragement of new players in ARR

I agree with se on this, if you play free to 50 currently you can get a lot of story done before you drop a dime if you want it faster pay for jump.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

One thing they could really add is the MSQ giving enough experience for you to break through it without interrupting.

It's fine the way it is now for SB content, but that makes little sense for ARR patch quests.

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I started a new character on a different server I was well in my 20s before the 1st dungeon. Doing mainly just msq.

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Originally Posted by TwistedTea

QFT

People defending the MSQ on the grounds of lore/"story-immersion", conveniently ignore things like, a new player who's not even completed ARR MSQ can teleport into Shirogane

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If you were to ask SE to give a lore explanation for why your character can teleport to Shirogane, despite having never been to the Far East, they'd probably say something like, "You're glimpsing a moment in the future of your character."

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Originally Posted by Berethos

I agree with at least the teleportation element suggested by the OP, especially since they already use it to great effect in Stormblood.

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And just like that, I'm on board with this idea. Putting an aetheryte (mini or otherwise) near Waking Sands is lore breaking and kills a major plot point of the MSQ. But ending a cutscene in Gridania with a fade to black that opens back up on you already inside Waking Sands is perfectly acceptable. The player just assumes that their character walked back there, off screen, and lore is preserved while time is not wasted.

I have a better suggestion... why not give players access to MOUNTS much earlier in the game and do away with the stupid "must reach xx point in storyline to increase speed" and just give them faster speed from the beginning? I get tired of hearing people wanting everything handed to new players... it's an MMO and thus players coming in should realize it's a LONG TERM investment. I, for one, refuse to jump or rush through content because... guess what... I want to live and experience the STORY. I don't want to jump and have no clue why I'm even fighting xyz since I skipped everything... and then have to depend on others to explain everything to me. If players want to do this, there already is the ARR skip available on the Mog Station. I've played numerous MMOs where they offer easy jumps to higher levels for new players and then veteran players have to deal with tons of incoming new players who don't understand skills, leveling, etc. Also, when you skip ARR and you lose a TON of XP for leveling since the MSQ offers tons of XP; to me this is not a help for new players, but then again, I prefer to gain my XP the old fashioned way- by leveling through actual game experience, not grinding for the sake of leveling. Many times when players simply grind to level, a few weeks later they end up moving on to another game because you're burned out from all the grinding. IMO, an MMO is about the journey, not the destination.

I see no reason whatsoever for the devs to go back and rework old content to condense the MSQs from previous expansions. Don't want to go through it? Buy a potion and call it a day.

As a veteran, if you want to help a friend catch up, do you wanna know how to do it? Join their party and queue as a tank if they are not one themselves. This is something in YOUR power to do to make things easier for a friend or FC mate. You can talk about all these bogus fetch quests for days, but nothing is going to delay their progression more than the queue times, especially if your buddy plays a DPS job. If you're so quick to want the dev team to drop everything they're doing to help new players, I'd stunt the requests if you are unwilling to do the same.

What the game should be doing is incentivizing max level tanks to run their roulettes. That is what is going to help low level progression for new players. Leave the MSQ alone. There's nothing wrong with it other than player impatience.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I see no reason whatsoever for the devs to go back and rework old content to condense the MSQs from previous expansions. Don't want to go through it? Buy a potion and call it a day.

As a veteran, if you want to help a friend catch up, do you wanna know how to do it? Join their party and queue as a tank if they are not one themselves. This is something in YOUR power to do to make things easier for a friend or FC mate. You can talk about all these bogus fetch quests for days, but nothing is going to delay their progression more than the queue times, especially if your buddy plays a DPS job. If you're so quick to want the dev team to drop everything they're doing to help new players, I'd stunt the requests if you are unwilling to do the same.

What the game should be doing is incentivizing max level tanks to run their roulettes. That is what is going to help low level progression for new players. Leave the MSQ alone. There's nothing wrong with it other than player impatience.

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What the heck is the point of becoming a tank and joining your friend on a tedious MSQ fetch quest?

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Originally Posted by Edax

No there is not lore as to why there aren't any mini-aetherytes in the Waking Sands. Yes, they talk about why the Syndicate hasn't placed a big one in Vesper Bay, but they don't need a big one in Vesper Bay. The mini-aetheryte can be gotten cheap on the Marketboard.

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Please tell us how many towns you have come across that have functioning mini aetherytes and no big ones and no connection to big ones. You'll find the answer is exactly zero. Even the housing district mini aetherytes are connected to the network of the corresponding city's main aetheryte.

You don't know your aetheryte lore.

Also a fast way to get to Vesper Bay is: Limsa > Arcanist's Guild > Take boat directly to Vesper Bay. You don't have to ride from Horizon.

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Originally Posted by Edax

And more to the point, do they really need alienate new players with the frustrating lack of fast travel back into the MSQ quest hub?

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I started playing proper in HW and I honestly didn't find the travelling tiresome. But I come from games in which teleportation has very long cooldowns, the list of venues to teleport to was tiny, and teleportation was mostly for classes of far higher level than new players. I honestly felt spoiled when I first started playing this game. Getting around is so fast and easy.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

Please tell us how many towns you have come across that have functioning mini aetherytes and no big ones and no connection to big ones. You'll find the answer is exactly zero. Even the housing district mini aetherytes are connected to the network of the corresponding city's main aetheryte.

You don't know your aetheryte lore.

Also a fast way to get to Vesper Bay is: Limsa > Arcanist's Guild > Take boat directly to Vesper Bay. You don't have to ride from Horizon.

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Doesn't mean it's in the lore that mini-Aetheryte need a big one. I direct you to the wiki: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aetheryte which does not mention that Aetheryte shards require being connected to a big one. Your own head-canon doesn't count.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

Also a fast way to get to Vesper Bay is: Limsa > Arcanist's Guild > Take boat directly to Vesper Bay. You don't have to ride from Horizon.

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And even you have to recognize how convoluted that is to reach the Main Story Quest Hub. I've already mentioned the ferry so explaining this to me was completely unnecessary.

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Originally Posted by Edax

Doesn't mean it's in the lore that mini-Aetheryte need a big one. I direct you to the wiki: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aetheryte which does not mention that Aetheryte shards require being connected to a big one. Your own head-canon doesn't count.

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But you don't use your head and think why are mini-aetherytes never completely on their own? Why are they always connected to a big one? The game may not explicitly say it, but the intention is clear.

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Originally Posted by Edax

And even you have to recognize how convoluted that is to reach the Main Story Quest Hub. I've already mentioned the ferry so explaining this to me was completely unnecessary.

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No my issue was never getting to the Waking Sands. My issue mostly lies in how the quests could be condensed for better storytelling, as there was a lot of needless "go talk to this person, this person, then this person" sometimes even in the same area. That's quite silly. Some of them play like single quests broken into several pieces.

For funsies I started over on a fresh alt on a different server, and let me tell you what sucks more than the random running around or whatever that the MSQ has you do - it's queue times for anything sub-30, because you're bottlenecked by no healers and unless SE does some redesign on how jobs are earned that's not going to go away. Even my alt, who I plan on playing as SCH, has to sit through 30 levels and 5+ MSQ dungeons/trials of DPS queues as an ACN for some awful reason - SE, please fix. Having no healers except CNJ start at level 1 is a massive oversight and has been since the game launched with ARR. Even with priority queue for first-timers, I'm still sitting in 10-minute queues for dungeons with every slot filled but healer, and when the MSQ is structured in such a way that you're blasted with Sastasha, Tam-Tara, Copperbell and Bowl of Embers with very little questing in between, I could see where a first-timer would think, "is this what dungeon queues are like in this game? and I can't skip them? blech" and quit.

Alternately, don't make dungeons required content for story quests, since they typically add really little to the narrative anyway.

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Originally Posted by Edax

What the heck is the point of becoming a tank and joining your friend on a tedious MSQ fetch quest?

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Where did I say that? Don't quote and entire post if you don't even read the whole thing.

I'm saying to stop complaining and just eat the quests like the rest of us have. And if anyone wants to help their friends to progress faster, stop asking the devs to rework old content. Instead, when they get to a stopping point and sit in a specific queue for 40+ minutes, then freakin tank for them.

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Originally Posted by Edax

What the heck is the point of becoming a tank and joining your friend on a tedious MSQ fetch quest?

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You are so hostile to everyone for no reason lol take a chill and relaxxxxxxxxx

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Originally Posted by Gemina

Where did I say that? Don't quote and entire post if you don't even read the whole thing.

I'm saying to stop complaining and just eat the quests like the rest of us have. And if anyone wants to help their friends to progress faster, stop asking the devs to rework old content. Instead, when they get to a stopping point and sit in a specific queue for 40+ minutes, then freakin tank for them.

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Is so many players are just leaving the game because of the AAR MSQ, then telling them to "Buy a potion and call it a day" is to completely miss the point.

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Originally Posted by Edax

Is so many players are just leaving the game because of the AAR MSQ, then telling them to "Buy a potion and call it a day" is to completely miss the point.

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I think you exaggerate how many players leave the game because of this. It is fairly common for people to find this part of the msq irritating but I think SE would have done something by now if "so many" were outright quitting over it.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

I think you exaggerate how many players leave the game because of this. It is fairly common for people to find this part of the msq irritating but I think SE would have done something by now if "so many" were outright quitting over it.

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I admit, I don't exactly have the figures of how many new players leave the game because of the MSQ. I can only speak for myself that I left the game because of it. Bought it at the same time as a friend, we played together for a bit, but I got bored and left, and didn't come back until like 16 months later after my friend convinced me to try the Trials of Bahamut – Real Escape Game at AX.

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Originally Posted by Edax

In all the years I played Runescape, I never felt like the game suffered from dead content, because they was so much to do at all times.

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RuneScape is the one game I know of that is actually unique in this way. As long as you don't care about noXPwaste culture, there is surprisingly little dead content. Largely because you don't need other players to go use an obsolete training method, etc. As long as it's fun, that's what matters.

Though there is still some dead content with team minigames and so on.

If you look at any standard progression MMO, though, dead content is everywhere.

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Originally Posted by Edax

I admit, I don't exactly have the figures of how many new players leave the game because of the MSQ. I can only speak for myself that I left the game because of it. Bought it at the same time as a friend, we played together for a bit, but I got bored and left, and didn't come back until like 16 months later after my friend convinced me to try the Trials of Bahamut – Real Escape Game at AX.

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I'm sure the number is few. I can also admit that msq grinding can be quite tedious in more than several occasions. But griping about it is akin to going to a Disney musical and then groan about all the singing.

This is unquestionably a story driven mmo, and if you want to know why in one cut scene everything looks fine and dandy, but then for some reason you are in a fiery ring of doom facing a story boss in the next; you're going to have to do some reading and some viewing.

We all know it's grindy. But it's not so extensive to prevent a player from getting caught up unless it's just too much for them to personally go through. There are the options like the potions for these players. But for those who do want to experience the msq, they should be allowed to do so without pressure to quickly reach endgame.

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Originally Posted by Areic

But that would take away from mogstation sales, lawd knows we gotta sell them boost and them 12 dollar single emotes.

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This is an unfairly harsh criticism of the Mog Station and SE's sales practices. They're implementing World Visiting, which is going to drastically REDUCE the sale of Server Transfers, and reduce the sales on the Mogstation as a result. They're actively de-incentivizing one of their cash shop services. Most of what is on the Mog Station is purely cosmetic or convenience as is.

I'm a new players, I started playing around 2 weeks ago, and I agree they need to do something about the MSQ. I like the game a lot but I'll have a hard time convincing my friends to play it with me because they already quit the game over it a couple of years ago and I can understand why. I personally can stomach it because I don't really mind doing repetitive task but it really need some trimming to please the general audience.

To me there's two main problems :
- The absurdly hight number of fetch quest. I've played dozen of different mmo and ff14 is by far the one with the hightest amount of them. Usually mmo are 80% kill or collect object quest and 20% fetch quest, in ff14 it's the opposite ! I think I've spend at least half of my 60 hours of ig time watching my character walking from point A to point B to point C to point A again ... Those quest are supposed to be filler not the meat of your game ! They should drastically reduce their number and increase the amount of kill quest, I want to play my character not summon my chocobo, press R and wait.
- The story, I've watched every cinematic because I've heard the story of this game is great ... well I think I can summarize everything that happen to me between lvl 1 to 40 in two sentences. 90% of the MSQ are filler, it usually goes like this : something dangerous is going to happen, you need to ask some npc to guide you to the source of said danger, then the npc ask you to do 30 quests for him to prove your worth ... I want to do heroic deeds like fighting the empire or the primordial, not help a has been make wine. They should remove all of those filler quest from the MSQ and make them optional side quest.

Also everyone here seems to have a strong opinion on the no aetheryte in the walking sand subject so here's my take : I had trouble understanding why one of the city you frequent the most didn't have any, then I read the lore explanation in this thread. The explanation make sense lore wise, but why did they create such a lore in the first place ? Knowing the reason why you can't teleport into the city doesn't magically make it less annoying. When your lore get in the way of gameplay to that extends it's not a good thing, I wonder how such a bad game design decision made it into the final game.

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Originally Posted by Kewitt

I started a new character on a different server I was well in my 20s before the 1st dungeon. Doing mainly just msq.

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You can level up doing the MSQ only up to level 35, after that you have to do side content or you're stuck.

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Originally Posted by Daethir

I like the game a lot but I'll have a hard time convincing my friends to play it with me because they already quit the game over it a couple of years ago and I can understand why.

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Well, guess "muh story driven MMORPG" is not the game for them.Even if they may like parts of the story or other MMO elements of XIV. They could pay for $kip potions since SE is a small indie company with artistic vision and doesn't need to care how their game is when compared to other MMORPGs.

Also somehow people skipping the MSQ, which is mostly a solo experience, affects the enjoyment of the story for the 'hard-core story enthusiasts'.

If nothing changes regarding the number of quests,especially filler content, I look forward to the day when we have over a 1000 MSQ quests and we can tell people things like, "It gets better in Heveansward!" or "It gets better in Shadowbringers!"

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To me there's two main problems :
Those quest are supposed to be filler not the meat of your game!...

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I think Edax expressed this well:

"It's the same mindset that would have anyone watching a popular anime would have when they skip the bad filler season. Yeah, it makes no sense to just skip every episode of a show and just watch the last one, but there is sense in excising the parts of a series that are utter time wasters.

So what if Waking Sands is a part of Vesper Bay? If Waking Sands got a mini-aethernet, that means the Waking Sands got a mini-aethernet, and not Vesper Bay. It's not like you only have to do one or two quests out Waking Sands, you would end up taking that ferry very many, many times. The plot of FFXIV isn't "Ride the Ferry 50 times" nor is its appeal."

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The explanation make sense lore wise, but why did they create such a lore in the first place ? Knowing the reason why you can't teleport into the city doesn't magically make it less annoying. When your lore get in the way of gameplay to that extends it's not a good thing, I wonder how such a bad game design decision made it into the final game.

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QFT