What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[Gardthorne]

Forced story for sure. Most new players want to get into battle content and then discover it's gated behind hundreds of hours of story. After that, you've got the playerbase. There's way too many players who resent the idea of new players skipping old irrelevant content. I've yet to see a rational reason given.

[LaylaTsarra]

Most new players want to get into battle content and then discover it's gated behind hundreds of hours of story.

Care to post a link to support this? Perhaps you might want to speak for yourself and not for most people.

[Xiomara]

While the story and the combat (2.5 GCD is perfect for me!) are the main reasons why I play this game, I introduced a couple of friends and the story gating was their main complaint, especially as I was doing the end game HW content, and they were slogging through the 2.0 MSQ.

If 4.0 still requires you to complete 2.0 at a minimum then they are gonna have to condense the 2.0 story by shunting the filler quests off to the side. Stuff like the pre Titan feast can easily be a sidequest chain. Also including a special teleport to the Waking Sands would be a massive improvement.

[Nuna]

Not sure. But my friend's complaints were that the battles feel heavily turn based and slow. They came from Guild Wars 2 though, which I never played.

I can't exactly relate as I was new in 1.0, a very different game.
But from what I gather in the Novice Network and some friends I've brought in is the lack of party content. It's a solo player game with some forced party instances. Lots of people wanted am MMO not a psuedo-offlibe FF game.

Sure this doesn't apply to everyone, I don't think any complaint dues, but this is what comes to mind when asked.

This too! My bf only plays mmos to play with me and having to do the story alone was irritating for him at first. There's no reason we can't duo or do the story in a party. I don't think they'd have to change the cut scenes or acknowledge the other players at all.

[Gardthorne]

Care to post a link to support this? Perhaps you might want to speak for yourself and not for most people.

1500 players across three FCs.

[LaylaTsarra]

1500 players across three FCs.

Post a link with evidence. You have a documented survey? Your post is meaningless. I have 20,000 players across 3 servers to support my claims that the story is the best part of it. See how that works? I win!

[Kosmos992k]

I can't exactly relate as I was new in 1.0, a very different game.
But from what I gather in the Novice Network and some friends I've brought in is the lack of party content. It's a solo player game with some forced party instances. Lots of people wanted am MMO not a psuedo-offlibe FF game.

Sure this doesn't apply to everyone, I don't think any complaint dues, but this is what comes to mind when asked.

But you can do FATE, levequests and dungeons in a party, along with treasure maps, and guild hests. The non dungeon/trial MSQ events are solo, but you can still run them along side others. There are relatively few pieces of content that force solo play. GC quests should allow (IMHO) up to a light party from the same GC to run the quests together, unfortunately they are one piece of content that does force solo play. Crafting and gathering are set up for player cooperation, not exactly party play, but still group oriented.

[Kosmos992k]

One thing that always seems to come up in these discussions is the 2.5 GCD, given the relatively short time to level any class past 15 - try starting an alt and see how much time it takes you to get all combat and crafting classes past level 10, it will surprise you how little time it takes, and crafting isbcheap when the guild vendors sell everything you need. Level 15 in one or two classes is a small additional time, and by then you have enough skills to be doing more than mashing one button and you start getting into dungeons. Your gear will be developing by then and as you continue to level, more skills are added and the complexity of content ramps up requiring more attention.

At the same time your skill speed/spell speedare increasing and marginally reducing you GCD. Honestly by th time you are about level 40, it's not 2.5 seconds any more, and that time rapidly feels even shorter due to maintaining position, dodging, target switching, maintaining aggro, picking up adds, healing and status buffs/debuffs. It also provides enough time to switch targets before casting. After level 50 unless you thoroughly overgear content the pace feels far faster than the base 2.5 second GCD would suggest. Honestly, the complaints of slow play are overblown from the start, and anyone that thinks lvl 50+ content has slow combat probably prefers action games or is even more ADD than I am.

Also, as Yoshi has said before, the first 50 levels are in essense an extended tutorial for the game.

On the topic of what turns off people in general, I have to say, sadly, that it's people, or the community. Too many people act in ways that would never be tolerated in the real world. I was watching something last night and something was said that I think sums this up;

In the end, it's just a game, so do what you want. If you want to kill someone, kill them. If you want to steal, you steal. I've met more people who think that way than I'd want. In a way, it's true. I used to think the same way. But it's not true... There are things you have to protect especially becuase it's a virtual world. I learned that from someone important. If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and the character are one and the same.

Emphasis is mine. All too often people treat others like an NPC, or worse, and they don't care about the consequences because "it's just a game." Wrong! It's real people, it's not just a game, real people are behind every character, real friendships form or fade every day, real hurt is handed out every day, it matters. How we behave matters. Any MMORPG community is only as good as it's members. The things that turn people off any multi-player game are many and varied, but how other players treat them, how other players act, the tone of the community is a bigger factor than any of it IMHO.

P.S. 1000 brownie points if you know the source of the quote.

[Freyyy]

At the same time your skill speed/spell speed are increasing and marginally reducing you GCD. Honestly by th time you are about level 40, it's not 2.5 seconds any more, and that time rapidly feels even shorter due to maintaining position, dodging, target switching, maintaining aggro, picking up adds, healing and status buffs/debuffs.

With SkS you go from 2.5 to maybe 2.4/2.3 sec, which is still REALLY REALLY slow. MNK/NIN get between 2.1 and 2.0 GCD and can get up to 1.9 if they have a SkS bloat (which is detrimental at this point because of TP-starving), and it's still slow. And for everything you listed after that, it doesn't make the gameplay feel faster nor harder in any way, shape or form. It just makes you do multiple things at once, which isn't really hard with a slow and very forgiving gameplay. I think that you're not really used to what faster paced games are and feel like.

As I said before: the game only starts to get a bit faster (but is still in the slow-paced category amongst other games) at level 50+, and it IS too late. Most players who are bored with the slow gameplay during the first few hours (level 1 to ~20 on your very first class while discovering the game) will leave before reaching that level and it's sad because even tho it's still slow, the combat gets a lot more interesting from level 40-50 onwards. Let's also not forget that the 2 weeks free trial only lasts until level 30 or 35, so someone who will want to try the game out for free before deciding if he wants to buy it and pay a subscription or not won't even get a small glimpse of what the gameplay really feels like at end-game and that's a problem. What they'll see is just a boring questing with a boring and slow battle system during the first 30 levels or so, and unless someone tells them, they won't know that it gets better at end-game, so they'll most likely stop playing.

[Kosmos992k]

With SkS you go from 2.5 to maybe 2.4/2.3 sec, which is still REALLY REALLY slow. MNK/NIN get between 2.1 and 2.0 GCD and can get up to 1.9 if they have a SkS bloat (which is detrimental at this point because of TP-starving), and it's still slow. And for everything you listed after that, it doesn't make the gameplay feel faster nor harder in any way, shape or form. It just makes you do multiple things at once, which isn't really hard with a slow and very forgiving gameplay. I think that you're not really used to what faster paced games are and feel like.

Your opinion, not mine. I think the game is plent fast enough as, it's not an action game. If that is the thing you want, this isn't that game. The point I was making is that there is plenty to keep up with after level 50, so the GCD is not, and should not be considerd 'slow'. Unless you have a need for twitch mechanics, which most certainly do not belong in FFXIV. You acknowledge that there is a lot going on but still focus on the GCD as if nothing else was happening.