Friends of mine, new to the game, becoming discouraged by STORY QUESTS

[CodingSquirrel]

Having just finished my grind from level 1 to the end of Heavensward (not the extra stuff patched in after 3.0, I'm still working on that) I feel like I feel like I have to agree with the OP.

A few of us in our guild were getting sick of the direction things were moving in SWTOR, so about 4 months ago we picked up FF. A couple of them were already max or near max level when we officially moved over and after the first two zones they instructed me that I should only be following the main story. So that's what I did, aside from dungeons and stuff I played exclusively the main story. The 1-50 story is great; it kept me entertained and interested. However, at hitting the post-50 quests leading up to Heavensward it was like hitting into a brick wall. The story was boring, not a lot was happening, most of the quests were filler, and you get next to no XP from it. It completely killed my excitement on the game and I actually could barely bring myself to log in. In fact, most of the time I didn't, for a little while most nights I found myself playing something else because anything else looked more fun. I had to force myself to in order to move forward and catch up with my friends.

Having those kind of filler quests makes sense when you're spacing it out over months of patches, but doing it all at once is an entertainment killer. All the people in this thread touting the story I think are completely missing the mark with their dismissal of the problem. Are you really going to hold up quests like "Hey great warrior of light, the most powerful person in the land, I forgot to mail out a letter. Can you please pick it up off my desk and put it in the mailbox for me? Thanks" as the pinnacle of story-based MMOs? Or, "hey I know we can talk over linkshell and all that but could you come to this town over here I want to talk to you. Great, now that you're here I'd like to go to other town on the other side of Eorzea to talk some more, meet you there. Well that was fun, let's go back to the original place now to finish our conversation." Whereas the ARR content and the 3.0 content kept me engaged and interested, the stuff in between had me wanting to drive nails through my eyes. It was an incredibly dull chore to get through. If they cut down those quests to just the important ones (probably 20% of the whole) then I could see that content as worth doing. But as it stands it serves as nothing more than a momentum killer for people trying to play through the game and hopefully get to max level.

[Alleo]

Having just finished my grind from level 1 to the end of Heavensward (not the extra stuff patched in after 3.0, I'm still working on that) I feel like I feel like I have to agree with the OP. [...] But as it stands it serves as nothing more than a momentum killer for people trying to play through the game and hopefully get to max level.

Yes there were some quests that are really not that interesting and I really hope that they do less of them in the future, especially those "go there and than here and well there too and than come back to me again" quests. I would be okay if they would cut those down a little with more expansions coming out but I don't want them to make all of the main story into a little movie or something like that..and comparing this story to games like Black desert all I can say is: Yes this games story is one of it selling points, it might not always be on the top but Black desert cant even compare to it. (Still enjoy that MMO for other aspects )

What I don't really understand: Why do you (not speaking of only you CodingSquirrel) have to hurry so much? Why is it so important to reach endgame so fast? Just because your friends are already max level does not mean that you have to power through the game. You can always play with them anyway and dungeons are still quite fun if you are doing them synch and there is even a raid for level 50 which is still not that easy synch. I had enough people in our fc that did the same and after that were bored quite fast. There is not much to do at max level outside of raiding at least not if you want to do some fighting. Doing ex primaes and other high level content might be fun for a time especially with friends but everything will become boring at some point. After that you will farm the stones and every new dungeon again and again to equip your character, waiting for the next patch.

Everything will be less fun if you power through it. Try to break it up a little. Maybe if you like gathering or crafting just do them for a time and maybe only finish a handful of quests each day. Or gamble your MGP away at the gold saucer . If you dont feel like playing the game for some time, its okay to not play it . I still like this game a lot but a little bit before another patch hit I get a bored of it so I do other things.

[CodingSquirrel]

What I don't really understand: Why do you (not speaking of only you CodingSquirrel) have to hurry so much? Why is it so important to reach endgame so fast?

Short answer: we're a raid team, that's the content we want to play together.

Long answer: we came here together because we wanted a different game (that's still getting updates) for us to raid in together. This is the only game we were collectively interested in moving to. Not being at a point where I can participate in the current raids has meant that our raid team has been mostly in limbo for the 4 months since we moved here. We also can't really fill holes or expand the team when some of us are still stuck behind the story grind. We've certainly had a lot of fun in the mean time, doing dungeons and such, but it's not the same as doing challenging raids. The dungeons are fairly simple, and you only need 4 people.

It's not that I want to skip everything else to get to endgame to complain that there's nothing left to do, it's that I want to do all (well most) of the content in the game, but some of it happens to be locked behind completing everything in the story first. In my ideal world, I would have been able to quickly get to the level I needed to participate in raids, while at the same time being able to progress in the story and all of the other content at my own pace. I don't (or didn't, since this is the first week I'm raid ready in FF) raid hardcore, only a couple nights a week. All of that other time is when I would normally be doing things like crafting, exploring, leveling alt classes, running the story, etc.

That's a little tangential to the thread topic and I'm not going to suggest that everything needs to be restructured so that you can skip ahead of the story for doing content like raids, but I do think that SE should consider improving the system they have. Acknowledge that there is a ton of filler in their main story which waters down both the fun of doing that story as well as the quality of the overall story itself, and do away with it as a requirement for progressing in the game. Make them optional sidequests, they progress the story just about as much as the average side quest anyway.