Extreme lack of quests

[Chrysania]

somehow, i magically got whm to 50, war 31 and pld to 32 without FATE-grinding except from 49 to 50, only because I didn't like Aurum Vale. I must have been hacking the game. Ban me.

why people like to gain exp via quests is beyond me. maybe it's the ffxi in me, but dungeon-ing is intensely fun especially if you are the tank or healer; and I get close to 1000 exp per monster in dungeons at lvl30 - not the fastest but it's enough - not to mention i get loots to trade in and some could even be sold, and heaps of allagan coins, and you get to party with people, and you get to learn game mechanics, and you get help people, and you get to have fun, and you get to, well you get the drift.

Hah. You only play heals/tank and you don't understand the problem. There's a surprise.

Dungeons are great fun, sure. Though, according to your logic, we should just...not play DPS anymore, 'cause DPS queues are 30 minutes - 4 hours long at all levels. They're not going to get better as time goes by. They will, in fact, get substantially worse.

DPS classes don't get insta-queues; we don't get to do dungeons every time we feel like clicking the button to do them. Try it sometime. When you get really sick of staring at the pretty scenery while watching your wait time in the queue tick over past hour 2, you have no quests and you're not doing so hot being forced to remain solo in fates, come on back.

We'll have a chair waiting for ya.

[Shuon]

Hah. You only play heals/tank and you don't understand the problem.

Let's retrace our steps to OP's point of there not being sufficient quest, which I have disagreed in my initial posts, and I could swear to God the quests were always there for me when I lvl-ed mine, as was agreed with by numerous others who replied here.

Then the thread went on to mention how FATEs are dry and boring and grindy. I therefore offered another solution - dungeons. Granted, I got it easy (lucky!) since I enjoy tanking and supports classes all along - but my point was, if FATEs annoy you, why don't you make it possible to level via other means, which in this case, dungeons. I would have totally tried to form an EXP/Dungeon party that just run the dungeons.

I reckon your response to that would be "but dungeons do not yield exp as efficiently as FATEs and therefore it is more preferable to just grind FATEs anyway". Well then that is a conscious choice you are making... Like myself, I could have chosen the more efficient FATE path, but I chose to do dungeons instead. Am I slower? Yes, for sure... But am I having fun? Ye definitely.

[Chrysania]

I love dungeons, personally. I do them as often as I reasonably can, and couldn't care less if they're not strictly the fastest way to get XP compared to certain zones' fate zergs. Rolling DPS, one does not get to just do dungeons, unless you have people in your pocket that say "Yes Ma'am" and do what you say, when you say, how you say 24/7.

I do not have such slavishly loyal minions, alas. When I'm staring own the barrel of having about 3 hours to play, I have a couple options.

I can get a guaranteed hunk of XP being bored in a fate zerg party

OR (There is no 'And' here)

I can be in a queue for a dungeon that will probably not pop, or will do me dirty and pop when I've got about a half hour left.

We SHOULD have the option of being able to do quests in what are otherwise dead-air times. Tanks and healers often get instant queues at all levels of play, and that's jazzy for them. I've played tanks and heals in other games and enjoyed the same celebrity status with groupfinder activities. I've seen not one slight, teensy difference for how its shaping out here for that.

There aren't enough quests; there isn't anywhere near enough that's fun to do. You can disagree all you like, Shuon; that's your right.

FFXIV already took a fifty foot face-skid across the shag carpet once already, though. Grindy, boring BS that is neither interesting nor fun doesn't sell anymore, and there are too many good options in the MMO market for something like this to have an icicle's chance up Ifrit's bum of surviving if they don't make it REALLY FUN to level things from 1-50.

Not brainlessly easy. Not 'XP from the sky and handed out on silver platters'. FUN THINGS TO DO.

Because even doing the same dungeon 26 times is really damn boring after about run 5 for most reasonable people, and elsewise having to rely on Fate zergs for anything resembling meaningful XP acquisition?

1999 called; Everquest 1 wants its bad ideas back. People tend to like positive engagements; rewarding activities, actively fun stuff to do; anymore.

But don't hang that phone up yet; 2013 called. SWTOR would like to tell you 'A big-name IP and a popular dev studio doesn't mean jack if your game just isn't fun to play'. Bioware made a Star Wars game that was like a pathetic clone of WoW circa 2007 and thought this was a good idea; insisted on it. Banked hundreds of millions on it.

They were wrong.

FFXIV 1.0 made it all the way to retail, with people at SE absolutely certain it had a fighting chance despite the fact that it was largely manufactured out of Stupid, WTF, Fail and I Don't Even Know What This Is Trying To Be Here.

Now we have ARR. It better be REALLY FUN TO PLAY, or that floor with bloodstains from some of the most supposedly unbeatable combinations of studio and IP that've ever existed and a 50' long Square-Enix FFXIV face skid through the middle of it?

It'll get another big, ugly, digitally bloody skidmark. Nothing more.

Here's the single, simple fact: leveling even one battle class just isn't fun as it is now. Its tedious in lots of the wrong ways and it makes you struggle inexplicably to even find means of gaining XP. Why does it do this? I'm hoping its because its a new game and they haven't gotten all the quests and content out yet.

You might disagree. You might enjoy what oyu enjoy as you enjoy it. That's great; most wouldn't. I point at many MMO's that have failed because their core game WAS NOT FUN TO PLAY. Now, I'll point at the games that are livin' large and lounging comfortably on their titanic mountains of gold (Looking at you, WoW).

Know what WoW does that most MMO's don't? It keeps you engaged at all times. You can't hardly run in a random direction and not find a hundred different things to look at, do or wander into and explore. A new player in WoW could easily spend the next year or two being just utterly immersed and lost in Azeroth, and not once lack for TOO MUCH to do rather than nothing worth doing at all.

New game is new game. I hope; I sincerely, ferverently hope; that the flagrantly anemic and broken leveling path is made much, much more fun...sooner than later.

Its kind've important. MMO's, as people keep thinking me unaware, are supposed to be long-term affairs.

If your core gameplay isn't selling your game, you're done. Go home.

I'm willing to bet that if we got 100 random people and had them try to play ARR in this state, clear to 50, over half of them would flat-out quit before level 20 just because being forced into dungeons ...isn't brilliant game design. It never was, and it only ever worked because, when it worked, there weren't numerous, good other games to play instead of putting up with what feels a lot like abuse in this one.

Well, abuse if you're a DPS anyway, 'cause THEM QUEUE TIMES. AHGAHD, that is untenable and I pity this game's future when people still need to do those dungeons to advance the core story, upon which EVERY BIT OF THE REST OF THE GAME IS GATED, and 99% of the playerbase is going 'lol noob get an FC' to anyone asking for help doing those.

This isn't a matter of what you like or don't, Shuon. This is an address of things that are as close to objectively bad, wrong and stupid to do in a modern MMO as is likely to ever be seen.