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

[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.