Seeing as I only play this game for the MSQ, if that takes a backseat and it becomes less story oriented, I will probably just quit.
he does also mention not wanting players to have to play hundreds of hours to get to a point where the game is enjoyable.
I think that could mean creating a new jumping off point, which imo would take a soft reboot, like throwing the WoL into a new shard alone with amnesia and levels reset, or actually making the current new player experience better and having better things for everyone to do in ARR zones
It does, but thats no reason to remove the MSQ. They should instead overhaul the leveling process part of the MSQ. Make it so you can join people and sync MSQ progress with newbies. Let you share quest progression and sync cutscenes. Maybe make 'some' of the solo duties be co-op accessible.
I expect that he is talking about the story as the dungeon and raids teams are pretty solid. Story needs a reset as they kinda boxed themselves in a corner with DT.
Relocate us to a shard and restart the story. Put the new starting zone there and use some story tricks to merge the new player into the WoL role.
Legacy players remember all before and the new players have amnesia.
A clean slate story wise would help them immensely, just as ShB showed them in the past.
I played closed beta for FFXIV 1.0 and was there for the demise of 1.0. I can only say this much: Yoshi-P has been doubted and questioned about "big" problems, changes, and improvements. When 2.0 went live and the servers cratered, this man wept for shame and gave us free game time for the mistakes "he" made. He's not perfect, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to get caught slipping. My money is on the man himself and he is a proven deliverer.
Remember the Endwalker issue where people could not login even after they reached 0 in the Line of a Loginqueue reaching up to 24000? That was a leftover Code issue from 1.0 and there may be more undiscovered issues.
Thats only one of the spaghetti code sources.
show, don't tell.
netcode ???
making world zones alive ???
literally just browse last 20 pages of general forums if you need points or direction what to start looking into.
I don't think the story is going anywhere, FFXIV still has to be a Final Fantasy game, but I do think the 1-90 MSQ squish would be good. Also giving players access to more of the game earlier would be great.