New player experience ( Changes needed asap, Feedback )

I am not even kidding here, recently I started playing with a friend of mine, we are now lvl50, but our MSQ lvl is ~30 and the road has been rocky to say the least and while some issues are smaller, they have piled up now to almost unsurmountable amount that just pisses my friend off and it's not fun for me either cause I know certain issues work themselves out as you get better, but that doesn't mean the issues are gone.

I personally have over 7000hours into the game, but my friend has zero experience and trivial non-issues are literal walls for my friend to climb over. And it hurts me to say they are trivial, because I know that I myself struggled with the same damned problems and almost nothing has changed since then. Specifically about ARR section of the game.

Here is a list of things from minor ones to big ones.

Small issues:

• Too many "are you sure" pop-up windows every time you travel or talk to specific NPC's near lifts or otherwise.
• In town teleport the need to press an aetheryte twice to teleport when other games show the location on hover.
• Despite MSQ icon being a meteor it still gets buried under a huge amounts of other yellow icons. Should be coloured similar to the logo on the MSQ UI menu.

Medium issues:

• Proper Character creation color wheel for hair and eyes specifically.
• Ability to disable icons from map you do not want is not present.
• Duty Support does not allow 2 player parties, it would be such a positive things to be able to do these with 2 players & 2 NPC's.

Large issues:

• Selecting a quest should give a "breadcrumb" line that the player can follow to the quest location, reducing the need to constantly open the map just because you ran too far. This should also direct the player to Ferry Skippers so players don't just start running the long way.
• In solo instances during the MSQ, AoE healing spells have no effect on keeping NPC's alive. Because NPC's are not party members. This results in the player needing to keep casting Cure 1-2 and not necessarily get to focus on doing damage as much. This is also very important for WHM because of how much time is wasted on healing NPC's.

Major issue (though can be brute forced):

• LvL 50 White Mage quest: "Heart of the Forest" is an absolute pain in the butt still to this day to newer players and reports of this quest being a pain goes back to 2013. And no it is not just the issue of gearing, sure you can brute force it by getting much higher level gear, but specifically for healers this quest causes a lot of headache due to how healers work in instanced solo content. They do not work the way that healers normally work. Even if you set it to Very Easy you can easily find yourself MP starved easily due to needing to spam cure 1-2 just to keep the damned tree alive.

Gigantic issue:

• Pointless MSQ moments. Start removing unnecessary "run here and back" MSQ stuff that add no value. We are at lvl30 in the MSQ and have been following the story quite closely, reading 80% of it out loud and my god the amount of times the NPC's talk about stuff that don't add any value is still insane, often times they literally have nothing to add and you're there just to prove to some NPC that you're helpful.

The most annoying part about all this is that when I try to find solutions for my friend through google or from my experience, often I am met with threads upon threads of people having similar issues, struggles or pointing out a specific thing from like 2014 and the same problems still persist like a plague. And if I draw from experience all I can often say is that "It's a 15 year old content". Hardly something that's all that helpful.

To add to this most of these issues are not mine. These are what my friend has noticed as problems for a new player who shows mediocre interest in getting into the game.

I am here just to facilitate the feedback so that these aspects can be addressed.

While some things in the MSQ could definitivly be removed, I think that one of the big issues with older expansion stuff is that : To help people level "fast", they give way more exp than before, and they also have put the content way too easy.

Another issue that you probably don't see right away, but, being level 100, we don't have much more button to click than when we were level 50 in ARR. The thing is, on every expansion, since they add "new skills", they also remove some skills so we don't end up with too many button. And by removing some skills, you end up with way fewer options than what we used to have in ARR. Also sometime, it's also by bad job design. Take Sch for example, back in ARR at level 50, you didn't just had broil to attack. There was 4 dots, an aoe bubble, an aoe attack, some normal attack, priest stance to swap wisdom and intellect (so increase heal/dps), etc. The gameplay was way more fun back then than a level 100 sch. But, my main point here is that many of the job feels "empty" at level 50 with just a few skills. And the issue is that the new player doesn't really learn the job that way. They have to wait to be level 100 to start being able to see what is the right rotation...

I think that they should not take new player this lightly. A job should be fun at level 15, 30, 60 or 100. And the experience points should, for the main character, follow the MSQ as much as possible. So maybe they should slow down the leveling, and reduce the experience point gained by a lot. Anyway, even if you reach level 100 fast, if you don't do the MSQ, you won't unlock the next areas from every expansion...

They should also pump up difficulty on low level dungeon. They used to be challenging in ARR. Now, even my cat clear them in less than 15 minutes by just sleeping on my keyboard...

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Originally Posted by Kirutsuki

Duty Support does not allow 2 player parties, it would be such a positive things to be able to do these with 2 players & 2 NPC's.

In solo instances during the MSQ, AoE healing spells have no effect on keeping NPC's alive. Because NPC's are not party members. This results in the player needing to keep casting Cure 1-2 and not necessarily get to focus on doing damage as much. This is also very important for WHM because of how much time is wasted on healing NPC's.

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These two things stick out the most because it's often cited that the worst part about trying to accompany a new player through the MSQ is that you constantly have to break and remake parties for the solo instances, and that you may find yourself constantly short anywhere from 2 to 22 people when trying to get through the MSQ, but there's no way to just use Duty Support as filler for whoever is missing. The end result is having to break down and do an unsync clear, which isn't always fun for either party watching the high level just one-shot everything while the low level tries to not die. (And even this isn't a perfect solution between one mandatory alliance raid and trials requiring more than 2 people to function.)

Having to heal NPCs in solo duties has always been awful to do, and so far those are the only solo duties I've had to redo multiple times because I'm not accustomed to playing a healer in general, and/or I have to heal multiple NPCs and the AOEs don't work. I was legitimately stuck for hours on a certain post-Shadowbringers solo duty because of it.

As much as I don't advocate for letting new players just auto-skip everything to instantly reach level 100 content with their friends, I understand WHY this is a frequent demand because FF14 can make the journey there troublesome when two players of wildly varying levels actually try to play together. And this is without even taking into account how often Crystal Tower causes a lot of sprouts to wilt and quit (if not from intimidation of doing a "large" raid then out of frustration trying to find just 11 other people at times), or how starting on low population data centers can further paint a bad first impression of how "active" the game is. This is all assuming of course that one can even reliably play with someone they brought to the game due to data center and world congestion.

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Originally Posted by Kirutsuki

we are now lvl50, but our MSQ lvl is ~30

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The MSQ does not really result in such a big difference until you go through Endwalker, unless you do side things such as roulettes or have the Road to 90 buff which doubles quest experience.

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MSQ icon being a meteor it still gets buried under a huge amounts of other yellow icons. Should be coloured similar to the logo on the MSQ UI menu.

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Red? That might be mistaken for the "don't meet requirements for this quest" color.

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Ability to disable icons from map you do not want is not present.

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It is odd that they have never added the ability to hide sidequests, but I suppose doing this decreases the amount people will do them, and then SE will have to feel they are even more wasted development effort. The problem with not making sidequests is that they are very good for lore and making it feel like there are other things going on. While others often complain about MSQ not being in an area for long enough, I never have this problem, because my memory of doing MSQ is camping in each village for a while doing lots of sidequests and getting to know all the residents.

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Duty Support does not allow 2 player parties, it would be such a positive things to be able to do these with 2 players & 2 NPC's.

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This is certainly a very common request, so there might be hope of it someday.

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Selecting a quest should give a "breadcrumb" line that the player can follow to the quest location, reducing the need to constantly open the map just because you ran too far. This should also direct the player to Ferry Skippers so players don't just start running the long way.

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When you start the game, the map is extremely confusing to read. Ul'dah is perhaps one of the worst of all. It stops being an issue when you get used to just opening the map constantly and zooming in and out to see where the exits are. They improved it one day by adding giant red arrows at exits, because dots were not clear enough really.

I don't necessarily think that such a feature is needed provided people can get used to the map, but the map itself could use improvements or explain how to use it through like a cutscene that brings up the map and says "scroll in to see further in, scroll out to see furthest out, here is how exits look", etc. Viewing this tutorial could be a button next to the mini-map and big map as well, perhaps.

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In solo instances during the MSQ, AoE healing spells have no effect on keeping NPC's alive. Because NPC's are not party members.

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This is not actually true. It depends heavily on which duty it is. Healer quests have to consider this because, well, you are a healer and are meant to heal the NPCs. During Stormblood, they were secretly developing the Duty Support system, but I actually noticed they were doing this because the solo duties dramatically improved their AI - the NPCs were running to stack with you, they were treated as party members, then they had them fighting with you in The Ghimlyt Dark. This culminated in the release of Duty Support in Shadowbringers, which followed that dungeon.

The issue is more likely that they didn't really change some old solo duties, because they will still use attacks that existed in ARR on the NPC's classes/jobs.

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Pointless MSQ moments. Start removing unnecessary "run here and back" MSQ stuff that add no value. We are at lvl30 in the MSQ and have been following the story quite closely, reading 80% of it out loud and my god the amount of times the NPC's talk about stuff that don't add any value is still insane, often times they literally have nothing to add and you're there just to prove to some NPC that you're helpful.

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To be fair, talking about things that don't add any value are often how people bond in real life and I believe their goal is to make it feel like you are bonding with characters. There are also many characters from ARR that we eventually meet again, even if we have long forgotten that we did, who we simply "helped" at some point or did a chore for. I do think it is a lot more annoying earlier in the game than later though.

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Originally Posted by AlliciaCapulet

While some things in the MSQ could definitivly be...

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For us early ARR dungeon up to Dezamael's Darkhold have been challenging enough, even though I have the experience, my friend is a WHM healer who's still learning the ropes and can't keep up all the time with heals as effectively as a veteran player.
And that's understandable, the difficulty comes from how the game functions, not from if the dungeon is difficult to do. And I think it's far more important that the game keeps early game dungeons somewhat easy so players can focus on things like;

Tracking your cooldowns, targeting the correct enemy, targeting the tank, looking out for debuffs & Avoiding AoE's. If new players had to also deal with a dungeon being ridiculously difficult it would only bring in the hardcore players who like challenge.

The way I see it is that because Job quests give you your spells for your class, you end up in a situation where you have a lot of spells but can't use any of them in MSQ anyway and a lot of the FATE's and dungeon's also downscale you.
So things feel like they are limiting you and you never get to play all the buttons.

If for example spells would be rewarded from MSQ your progression would directly correlate to what dungeons and areas are available to you. And you could add an added requirement for optional dungeons so that you have to own a specific spell to access it.
This way you can't do what we did which was that we were doing a lvl35dungeon without unlocking our jobstones yet.

Outleveling the MSQ is a good thing. I had to grind from 46 to 49 in Aurum Vale on two characters way back then. It sucks. Moreover, FFXIV isn't a tutorial on how to play an RPG, or even an MMO as a genre. The game's mechanics are intuitive as long as you've played an RPG before. If someone can't use a map efficiently to reach their destination, that is an issue on their part, and I'd strongly suggest playing literally any other game (assuming that like OP, they blame the hame) that does more handholding. Do not implement even more handholding in this game. Map awareness is a good and fun aspect of RPGs. The game doesn't need to become even more friendly to people who don't actually like the game the way it is, and demand to get everything handed to them while using putting in no thinking of their own. The kits around ARR levels are so small that failure to handle them is unlikely unless you're actively not trying.

Since OP is carrying their friend, I expect they have made said friend choose Legacy movement, done keybinds with them and most importantly, have done HUD layout stuff with them. If the friend needs that much assistance, I hope OP provided help as well.

Then again... telling a WHM to use Cure I past the unlocking of Cure II proves that problem lies with OP and their friend. (Lucid Dreaming exists and while you can go OOM, this typically will not happen unless you refuse to press it or lack gear).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The MSQ does not really result...

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We've been doing alot of Hunting logs and Grand Company logs cause my friend wants to unlock the prismstones as fast as possible for layering armor. We've also been doing FATE's very actively all of which my friend enjoys.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Red? That might be mistaken for...

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Red and Yellow more specifically, sure it could be confusing, but there's far more yellow than there is red in quests on the map. And it's also confusing that the UI icon is colored different from the icon on map, causing confusion is all.
It really doesn't need to be red, heck make it blue, but make it consistent so it looks exactly the same in all menus.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It is odd that they have never added the ability to hide sidequests, but I suppose doing this decreases the amount...

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Options is always good, it should not be something the devs decide for the player because they dicided to add some sidequests that are unique. Maybe that's a sign that you need to add a subcategory for sidequests that are somewhat unique like the bluequests, but aren't just nonsense XP stuff. And then be able to filter them out category by category.
E.g remove icons: Side Quests (normal yellow), Lore Quests (purple), Feature Quests (blue).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

When you start the game, the map is extremely confusing to read. Ul'dah is perhaps one of the worst of all.
I don't necessarily think that such a feature is needed provided people can get used to the map

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There are times when a simple mis-click can suddenly show you a map of Limsa Lominsa and you've lost all bearing of where you are, are you lookign at the zone you are in or not and the easiest solution 99% of the time is to just close the map and open it again. I do however think breadcrumbs is almost a necessity. There was a specific moment when a quest asked the player to go from Limsa Lominsa to Aleport and my friend didn't fully comprehend what was being said. This was the first time the game mentioned Ferry dock system since we started in Gridania and it took a solid 10minutes of me just watching my friend try and figure it out through the map. And even when my friend opened the Ferry Dock window for travel to Aleport they closed the menu because Aleport was different from Aleport Docks which is what the map shows as a location. Sure, that's pretty funny, but it shows me that when a new player plays the game and the map keeps functioning in weird ways and places are named different in different menus that a new player would just close the game and not touch it again. I do not think XIV has ever done a tutorial in a good way, even the more modern ones are intrusive and get in the way of player actually trying to enjoy a game.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

This is not actually true. It depends heavily on which duty it is. Healer quests have to consider this because, well, you are a healer

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I'm specifically talking about the solo duties that you have to click and "destinate" to. So far in ARR we have not seen a single one where AoE heal spells would work. Only single target healing spells work and early on thats only Cure 1-2 maybe 3 but you lose the AoE effect on 3.
Sure it could be different in expansions, but specifically in ARR it is not possible to use Medica 1 and for that to heal other NPC's.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

To be fair, talking about things that don't add any value are often how people.

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Sure and I have kept track of those who I deemed as somewhat important and made note of them to my friend as to why certain parts like the Ala Mhigan questline is there, it's all world building and for you to spend some time at least with these characters.
But, for example in the Sylph questline there's a moment when one of the Sylphs runs away from the camp you go and talk to them and they run away from you.
So now you have to report back to the Sylph quest giver only for them to say we should chase after the one who ran away from us. Like, bruh... This isn't a single instance either of something like this and it just adds unnecessary amount of running back and forth and nothing being said that isn't already known.

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Originally Posted by 0blivion

Do not implement even more handholding in this game. Map awareness is a good and fun aspect of RPGs. The game doesn't need to become even more friendly to people...

Since OP is carrying their friend, I expect they have made said friend choose Legacy movement, done keybinds with them and most importantly, have done HUD layout stuff with them. If the friend needs that much assistance, I hope OP provided help as well.

Then again... telling a WHM to use Cure I past the unlocking of Cure II proves that problem lies with OP and their friend. (Lucid Dreaming exists and while you can go OOM, this typically will not happen unless you refuse to press it or lack gear).

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We've done a bunch of System Configurations and Char configs that all proved a net positive to the play experience. That alone speaks volumes when the default settings the game has actively fights against how players actually enjoys videogames, sure very subjective, but a certainly something I noticed and found somewhat humorous.
I also have never wrote to use Cure I over Cure 2. I have even guided them to only use cure 2 for the most part, but my friend is still new and that quest specifically is very hectic so spamming whatever cure you have is bound to happen. I feel like people forget how it was like when they started playing all too often.
Please go invite some of your friends to play who never have played anything similar and see how they do.
It's not as simple as saying "just do this" when the player can barely find the correct target at times behind a mountain of mobs.

Gatekeeping people away from a game is never something I'm rooting for just for the sake of "pleasing the veterans". Especially when it comes to the general gameplay during MSQ. The game already resorts to such a degree on teleports barely anyone walks from point A to B unless it's the next zone over.
If anything a breadcrub system actually pushes people to walk from point A to point B even if it's war away because they spend less time looking at the dumb map and more time looking at the cool environments and actually learn the layout of the map, by; you guessed it, traveling in it. Not by figuring out if you can walk or do you need to find a boat or maybe there's a magical unicorn behind the corner that is used to teleport you to your location, but because you missed 1 line in a dialogue you're lost.

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Originally Posted by Kirutsuki

I do not think XIV has ever done a tutorial in a good way

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I think they have done some. Specifically the new kind that we get for, say, NPCs following us. I also think Hall of the Novice would be good if it didn't keep us tapping our foot for ages or just voiced the dialogue.

It would be good to have ones that explain it with the hand cursor, similar to Final Fantasy 7, which has a whole tutorial explaining the Materia system. The FF games following that have it too, where they show you how to use the UI.

It's crazy to think that they had tutorials figured out in the 90s and now they don't. But that's true of many things with this game. It's got wrong things that were figured out long before, even by past MMORPGs.

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Originally Posted by Kirutsuki

We've done a bunch of System Configurations and Char configs that all proved a net positive to the play experience. That alone speaks volumes when the default settings the game has actively fights against how players actually enjoys videogames

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I couldn't agree more. Status effects are in the top-right, and for over two years (even while doing Savage in Heavensward), I did not KNOW that there was part of the status effects bar at the top. It was hidden by the mini-map!!!

I also used Standard controls while doing Heavensward Savage. It made Savage infinitely harder. It's insane the night and day difference switching to Legacy made.

Then there is the "click field to untarget". It would be very annoying to lose your target constantly by misclicking, yet that is the default. When I told a player about it once, it was game-changing, to the point of potentially making them not quit the game.

What about showing boss HP as a %? I have known a veteran player doing Savage that didn't even know this was a thing...

And now, what if people do not enable role colors (blue, green, red) in Display Name settings? It's a massive advantage to know who is the healer and where on the field they are, without having to compare their name to the Party List. Actually game-changing in High-End content, significantly increasing the ability to adapt to mistakes by quickly locating, say, a healer, or identifying which role messed up.

What about battle effects. The game is unplayable with all effects enabled, because it covers bosses in effects to the point you can't see the mechanics. And new players have to endure this unaware of settings.