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

[Lisotte]

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As someone who has brought recently not 1, not 2, but 3 newbies to the game I can say that if they want to lock jobs (aka: the thing that you will identify as in this virtual world), lock jobs behind the story, they need to make the story a lot better especially at the beginning. The frequent comments I hear are "the story is all over the place," "when do I get to group up with people for the story," and "when are the story fights not facerolly."

[Ersilon]

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I'll happily jump on the bandwagon that locking the jobs was a bad idea. Heck, SE themselves admitted it. The issue is that they made it that way, and that they're not going to just rework it. SE has learned from this, however, and future jobs in 4.0 aren't supposed to be locked behind 3.x. But pining for the existing stuff to change when Yoshi-P's team has been reduced for FFXV development and they have to create update content for patches, it's just not going to happen.

And yes, the story isn't exactly the best. There are a number of improvements they could do for it, and you listed several of them. Again, the problem is that the XIV team is manpower short and you're talking manpower intensive changes.