being new and @ level 50 is killing my interest

[m3eansean]

In my case, they can leave the entire story line intact. I just want to be able to walk in to the damn zones, to gather at the new nodes. I have plenty of classes I can move the story forward on but the bulk of my game is spent on DoH and DoL. I am being forced to power through the MSQ to play those aspects. I don't want to but short of buying all mats on the market, that's how I am being forced to do it.

You need flying to access the new nodes. It will be impossible for you to gather highest level items without having a battle class to 60. FYI.

[Ortamus]

Because that is the purchase site not the informational site. Its there so you can purchase the game. Its has just enough information to verify that you are purchasing the product you want. Its not there to help you figure out which product you want to purchase.

As I said, not everyone will research it and SE will be aware of that fact. So, letting players know in places they can purchase it would be the decent thing to do. That's all.

[Niwashi]

It's just a way to extend subs. Which is kinda odd because players are giving up soon after 2.0 and being stuck in the 2.1 > 2.55 limbo where character progression is none existent. My bro and 2 friends have gone to play Tera because they got bored of doing boring content for over 2 weeks, don't blame them tbh.

So they had a couple weeks in which their only character progression is updating their gear (and leveling if they have HW unlocked), along with advancing the storyline and unlocking dungeons/trials/raids. If that has them quitting because it's too boring, then does it really sound like they'd like endgame any better?

[Niwashi]

In my opinion, Its better this way. The story is one straight arc from level 1 right up to level 60. For a truly new player who is just playing and enjoying the story, They will simply play through MSQs as they have done from 1 - 49, The only difference is that the MSQ fights get harder without increasing in level.

Now that the story does flow through to its continuation, I wonder if SE will ever go back and redistribute a bit. There's that level gap from 46 to 49 with no MSQ and then a glut of them at 50. If some of the early level 50 quests were brought down to a slightly lower level to help fill that gap it might make for a smoother run.

[416to305]

This thread doesn't make any sense, like what do you want exactly? If you decide to buy HW, you get the new race, and experience past 50. The content like Ishgard is part of the story, you can't just suddenly go walking in there when you're constantly told they have their gates closed. The finale of ARR takes care of all of that and starts the next story, so being able to access those areas would make no sense at all and for most you wouldn't last long anyway since areas that have enemies at level 58 would just wipe you as they are hard as is even when you're the same level. I think the HW story is awesome and I'm way more into it than I was with ARR. 20 minutes for DPS queue is pretty normal. Besides on one is forcing you to do all the level 50 stuff, just the MSQ which all of us here did already. Like what exactly do you want to do in Ishgard or the new areas anyway, even if you could access them now? You can't do any of the dungeons as they are unlocked as part of the main story quests, same with certain aerythite points, the things you collect to let you fly. So even if the gates were open, there's nothing you can do there anyway for the most part. Suck it up and deal with it like everyone else here did. Like others mentioned, we had it worse anyway, no exp at 50 when doing all the MSQs, and then running the same dungeons over and over for tomes to get better gear, all of which is replaced as part of the main story with gear way better, all just for "Go kill 3 XYZ enemies".

[Niwashi]

2) The gating in this game is silly and a bad decision for an MMO company that should know better, but I think the poster above me beautifully explains the reasoning why. To say the least, SE is a company with plenty of MMO experience. They should've known better than to lock the new jobs to level 50 + story.

I think they should have gated access to the new regions and the MSQ continuation behind the 2.x MSQ, but allowed players to pick up the new jobs ahead of time (perhaps unlocking at 30 since that's the level they begin). It would have still kept the most sizeable chunk of new content where it makes sense with the story but also allowed new people to feel they were getting more from the expansion than just Au Ra.

(It would, of course, require job trainers for the new jobs to be somewhere in the original ARR regions. I've heard that the storylines for those job quests are rather integrally tied to being in Ishgard, but that's because SE wrote them to be there. If they'd decided to place the job unlocks elsewhere, they'd have a different story tied to them.)

[RedShipRaider]

The post quests are scattered with lore and background story for the characters/places you visit while being crammed full of additional pointless fluff who's now outdated purpose was to extend the time players spent logged in between patches or guide them to underused content like Qarn and Hero in a Halfshell.

Fixed that for you.

XIV is a story driven game, building up a story and creating a world that makes sense.

This is true, and I love the game for it's story! It really is the one thing that makes it stand out. But over the years a considerable amount of filler has been injected into that story in order to meet short-sighted game goals that have absolutely nothing to do with the narrative. Requiring new players to go through that BS is killing the game's ability to retain new players, which is extremely vital to the success of an MMO.

[RedShipRaider]

1k characters is a rather restrictive number for any sort of real communication of ideas. -.-

Look at it this way. FFXIV is a better game than GW2 in pretty much every category. It has more content, it has a more cohesive and well written story, it has better thought out battle mechanics that only had to be thrown out and reimplemented once rather than repeatedly. Yet despite this GW2 has been much more successful than FF14, having sold more copies, retaining more players, and making more profit for NCSoft than FF14 can ever really hope to considering the double-development money pit that they wound up in. A major reason for this is because FF14 has never really been able to retain players, between the original subpar game and now these barriers to entry that are full of as much pointless time wasting fluff as they are good story content. The majority of new people come, they play until they get hung up on filler, and then they let their subscription lapse.

[Niwashi]

This strategy of requiring story completion to play new expansions cannot continue on past this one. If the next expansion (4.0) requires you to complete all of 2.x and all of 3.x, then they might as well slap a "new players need not apply" sticker on the box. That's too steep a mountain to climb just so a new player can enjoy "current" content.

That is a problem, but not due to the amount of time it takes to go through the content.

The issue is that each expansion needs to be purchased and expansion purchases require the base game, not the whole string of previous expansions. There will be people buying the 4.0 expansion who never bought Heavensward so don't have access to its content. Makes it pretty hard to require completion of that content. Requiring completion of the base game is different, since everyone getting the expansion needs to have the base game.

What about 5 years from now, when we have several expansions? "FINALLY convinced my wife to play the game with me! I'm hoping to have her caught up by next February..."

That part would be fantastic. Who wouldn't want a game that has a ton of content that can keep you productively advancing your character for such a long time before getting stuck at the end where all that's left is just grinding the same old thing over and over.

[416to305]

There's no problem with how it works, people complaining are just the ones starting late. I booked it through the quests and worked my ass off to finish all level 50 quests to be ready for HW, so not sure why other people think they should be given a free express pass or be able to access HW content without finishing other things from 2.0 first. I'd probably be annoyed as well if I was just starting, but that's just life, you can't have everything given to you. Like you all realize this is a story game right? How exactly do you plan on enjoying the HW story and content without finishing 2.0's first? It wouldn't even make sense! 2.0 ends in a cliffhanger basically "to be continued", so getting to do things in HW would be like watching the first and second Harry Potter movies, and then skipping to the last one because you're too impatient to watch the ones in between.