Game needs to be more newcomer friendly, but NOT with level-boosts

[Terin]

If someone wants to play a Dark Knight (or any of the new jobs) wants to play one, do you SERIOUSLY think they're going to spend 60+ hours playing a character they're not interested in, just to "test the waters" once they unlock it?

FFXIV is a wonderful game, but new Races and Classes/Jobs are a major selling point for new players. It's actually a psychological tick, that gets them to say "This game looks interesting, and with this new class, it's the perfect time for me to jump in".

[Ersilon]

If someone wants to play a Dark Knight (or any of the new jobs) wants to play one, do you SERIOUSLY think they're going to spend 60+ hours playing a character they're not interested in, just to "test the waters" once they unlock it?

FFXIV is a wonderful game, but new Races and Classes/Jobs are a major selling point for new players. It's actually a psychological tick, that gets them to say "This game looks interesting, and with this new class, it's the perfect time for me to jump in".

If they're serious about playing this game, then yes, they are. It took my wife and myself four months playing together to get through the MSQ to the point where we could unlock DRK and AST. It took us quite a bit of time to discover the ideal way for us to level, given our situation where we have small children who often demand our attention and make running dungeons with strangers nerve wracking. That only slowed us down, not stopped us. Yes, it was annoying to have to grind through all of the 2.x patch MSQ's, but that's the story, and Final Fantasy has always been about telling a story.

When Wrath of the Lich King was the current expansion for WoW, you had to actually level a character to 55 just to be able to roll a death knight.I'm not sure if it's still required, but I certainly hope so. It's just a requirement to have spent some time and effort for a reward. Here, you have to just get to 50 and do the MSQ to get to Ishgard. It isn't hard. It just requires time and effort.

If someone's picking up the game solely because of an expansion job with no interest in anything else this game happens to offer, then yes, they're going to quit as a natural result of buying the game for the wrong reasons.

[ToasterMan]

I'm going to address the elephant in the room here and ask, maybe the MSQ and the mechanic to lock everything behind it was a poor design choice to begin with? Maybe the MSQ itself was designed poorly from the get go? Maybe SE just didn't think ahead?

[SendohJin]

I'm going to address the elephant in the room here and ask, maybe the MSQ was designed poorly from the ground up? And SE just didn't think ahead?

part of it was designed to drag you around the world map so that you would explore every zone.

other parts of it was designed to make it longer so that you wouldn't run out of content as fast.

perhaps they didn't think this far ahead but they wanted people to have enough stuff to do till the next patch and not quit before then.

[Berethos]

part of it was designed to drag you around the world map so that you would explore every zone.

other parts of it was designed to make it longer so that you wouldn't run out of content as fast.

perhaps they didn't think this far ahead but they wanted people to have enough stuff to do till the next patch and not quit before then.

What they likely thought was that people would sit down and enjoy the story all the way through, and then enjoy what the game had to offer when they finished the story. Planning ahead for those who want to skip a significant portion of your first several dozen hours with the game probably wasn't on the table very often.

[Souljacker]

What they likely thought was that people would sit down and enjoy the story all the way through, and then enjoy what the game had to offer when they finished the story. Planning ahead for those who want to skip a significant portion of your first several dozen hours with the game probably wasn't on the table very often.

Perhaps, but that just shows how absolutely out of touch they are with how mmos play versus how offline games play. In an mmo it's a rush to get to the content that everyone is doing. When you start playing a game where everyone is farming Nidhogg Ex, and you have to still play through a bunch of story and other content that other people don't have to do anymore because everything is artificially gated, well, you might get frustrated and give up. It's not just locked behind level; it's locked behind a progression that has long since been completely obsolete.

The other concern is this hammering of old content with putting grind items behind it. I am already so sick and tired of doing old raids, but I understand that it's important to force veterans into them because they were so tied to story. Still, that's only going to take SE so far. Eventually the majority of folks will get tired of running this content. It won't be today, it won't be tomorrow, and they might get another year or two out of artificially adding grind tokens behind it, but eventually players will move on to other mmos that have a better blueprint for earning powerful weapons; a blueprint that doesn't involve doing low level dungeons ad naseum. When you think about it, it really doesn't make sense to put a relic behind a lot of grinding that isn't even at the current level cap.

Sooner or later the subscriptions will start falling if they keep this model, and new subs will not make up the difference because players know there's too much of a wall between them and end-game.