Quote Originally Posted by RichardButte View Post
The storyline in Heavensward is amazing, thus far. I'm really, REALLY drawn into it whereas I was only mildly interested in the storyline in ARR. A tip of the hat to the devs for that.

But that brings me to the primary issue I'm seeing with the current way the storyline works in ARR content...

...

I say this because I've literally been unable to coax two of my friends past the amount of story quest that this game has. It's not quite as bad if the story is really grabbing you, but if you're only mildly interested in it, it's enough to make people not want to play any longer, even with the promise of fun raid encounters in the distance. :\
I think the problem here is that you are trying to force your friends to through the storyline instead of letting them enjoy it.

In every RPG... there are two reasons why people quit:
a) It's too grindy.
b) It's too boring.

The first problem is more easily rectified by having their friends actually help them. I'm far more willing to redo storyline than I'm willing to redo bloody kill-and-fetch quests.

The second problem is that it's not the right game for your friend. Yes FFXIV needs a little more coax'ing to get to where the storyline feels important (In FFXIV V1.0 I never really got into the storyline because there was no real direction in what you should be doing next.) At least V2.0 doesn't do that.

What would improve the quest system just enough to solve B is to delineate the difference between Main Quest, Class/Job quest, and Optional quests. The optional quests are just for experience and gear and aren't repeatable. In order to get to level 30, you have to actually do the main quest and the class quests and if the people you play with are having trouble with the class they picked (maybe whatever they picked is no fun, think about the queue times.) Once you get to 30, you have the extra required-to-do-but-not-evident Job quests which are setup as optional quests.

So that's a lot of stuff to do just to get on the "right track" with whatever role you want to play in the game.