What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[synesthetic]

How is limiting gameplay and content to 4 buttons ANY fun? Thats beyond stupid. FF is built around using a bunch of abilities and spells in fights, having the GCD at all hinders this system terribly. F*** the GCD system seriously.

I don't think anyone said to limit it to 4 buttons?
The point from my original post was that combat here has a much higher learning curve than in most other games I've seen, which makes the divide between good and bad players extremely wide here, and this clear division exacerbates the "this game has too many assholes" problem that I know has been a turnoff for newbies (or everyone really). For example, I'll see a good DPS parse for 1.6k on something in a dungeon, then another DPS doing only 300 on the same thing. Not even afk/autoattacking, some people legitimately -trying- do that little, even though a BLM spamming just Blizzard1 all day does more.

And that's just for DPS. Every class has points defining what clearly separates "good" and "bad" players, and frankly, content is designed towards players actually leaning towards the "good" end, but is meant to be loose enough to allow everyone to carry everyone on the "bad" end. And people get tired of carrying like that, and some people get indiscriminately cranky. On the other end, there are plenty of newbies who take any advice as a grave insult.

So again, the game in this way encourages unfriendly/intolerant player behavior and "maybe there's not enough time or incentive to really learn combat. Alternatively, combat is maybe too complex or poorly taught."

[DPZ2]

Here's an example:
The Ladle in the Darkness

Funny thing about this and the other 4 quests that follow. Before HW hit, if you weren't level 50 by the time you got to Blue Fog, or slightly undergeared, this quest, and the others in the series involve you in a little bit of combat, explain what's going on in Norther Thanalan so close to the enemy and prep you for that last bit of XP you might need to get to level 50. You can't finish that 4th quest until you hit level 50.

Are they meaningless? Only if you don't believe you deserve that GC rank of Second Lieutenant. They are exactly the sort of things you would do to hearten the troops for the big push that shortly follows.

If you came late to the party, of course you want to whiz through this to get to the 'good stuff'. Perhaps SE will accommodate you, perhaps they can't without radically revising the story line: Cataclysm anyone?

[Kosmos992k]

Boring forgetful text reading story. Compared to other MMO's that have a talking NPC at every corner.

Imagine that! A game that actually encourages you to use your imagination.... Shocking!!

[Platinumstorm]

The things I have heard from my friends who won't play.

1. Combat is slow and unexciting.
2. Fetch and deliver quests everywhere.
3. Artistic differences

[Kosmos992k]

The things I have heard from my friends who won't play.

1. Combat is slow and unexciting.
2. Fetch and deliver quests everywhere.
3. Artistic differences

Then it's entirely possible this is not their kind of game. Halo is not my kind of game, but you won't find me posting (on it's official forums) proposals to fundamentzlly change it because I am free to do something else. By the same token if this is not someone's kind of game then they are free to do something else.

[Shurrikhan]

3. Artistic differences

If I may ask, are we talking terrain and character/mob model aesthetics, zone layout, UI, or some less visual form of art?

For instance, the fact that at least on my lower end computer, ground terrain and brush seem to flicker constantly during movement and at-distance drawn portions of terrain can include some really huge features to be adding in at some 100 yards away (chunks of mountains, etc.), whereas I won't find those issues or certain not as much in MMOs with a more cartoony or watercolor-ish style. If I were to correlate those issues with the art style, would my dislike be due to artistic difference (preferring one style and what all it includes or what compromise comes with it, over another)?

Boring forgetful text reading story. Compared to other MMO's that have a talking NPC at every corner.

I may be blowing anecdotal evidence out of proportion, but I do at least know that I'm not the only one who will turn off NPC voices because they prefer their imagination over the (typically mediocre at best) voiceactor.

If you came late to the party, of course you want to whiz through this to get to the 'good stuff'. Perhaps SE will accommodate you, perhaps they can't without radically revising the story line: Cataclysm anyone?

I apologize for how tangential this will be, but just some food for thought:

Let's say there's a MMO that added playable races as the game progressed, but had them locked behind certain bits of quest and particular levels. Similarly, that race would then start at the acquisition level, and, because they had a completely different MSQ from character creation up to a point some eight to fifth of the way to level cap beyond when you could acquire said race, they were automatically progressed in story as well. The idea is that you now get to see the 'other perspective', wherein the actions of your previous character can even have an effect on the side-MSQ of the new one, while simultaneously limiting the playerbase's "rarer" races and allowing races that are supposed to be naturally more powerful to feel more powerful at creation (in this case, because their entry level is some third or half way to level cap for another race) and allowing their MSQ to feel entirely their own so much of that development time being missed by, or outside the interest of, those players who will only play the traditional or humanoid races (hook em' with plots they already know and hopefully enjoyed, and make them enjoy it even more through just the right amount of variance to be new yet connected — ominous and provocative).

Okay, long intro, but here's the reiteratable part: you can release side-content, visible to both the original and redacted MSQ lines, that can replace or be substituted for the MSQ without having to cut out any of its prior development time, thereby wasting it, nor only attracting the interest of new players (not that they'd know there had even been a change, if the redaction had been made directly to the original line). In many cases, it can even have a much greater sense of identity, or can even build up fellow hero archetypes that might be used later, by the original or any other redacted line, as well.

[Gumbercules]

I think the game could greatly benefit from having active skills come in alot sooner in the leveling process with the passive traits coming in later, namely weaved into your "job" levels so you are still getting an active every 5 lvls. This seems like a nice compromise between the current "to bring in new players into the genre" and the vet mmo-er that might want to give this a shot. Could also lead to a faster entry into teaching a new player their roles, for example if a player gets shield oath by 15 he has it as his tanking toolset when hes tanking already, then could get sword oath at 30 to potentially start toying with the idea of stance swapping for dps/phase pushes etc.

[HakuroDK]

Adding my two cents here.

So my mother is a veteran World of Warcraft player, but as a Frost Mage, she was incredibly salty at the issues with her class and the Proving Grounds content which acts as a barrier to a lot of content. But wanting to try something new, I invited her to try FFXIV. Maybe this is a bad example, but she didn't like all of the unskippable cutscenes early on. They've been mitigated since then for sure, but there are still some that are unskippable.

I'm not saying I agree with her--on the contrary, I love FFXIV's story--but I get how new players might not want to invest themselves into the story of a game they're just trying out.

[Shurrikhan]

I think the game could greatly benefit from having active skills come in alot sooner in the leveling process with the passive traits coming in later, namely weaved into your "job" levels so you are still getting an active every 5 lvls. This seems like a nice compromise between the current "to bring in new players into the genre" and the vet mmo-er that might want to give this a shot. Could also lead to a faster entry into teaching a new player their roles, for example if a player gets shield oath by 15 he has it as his tanking toolset when hes tanking already, then could get sword oath at 30 to potentially start toying with the idea of stance swapping for dps/phase pushes etc.

One of the big things I'd like to see is just that we get our skills at a level in which we feel like we could really put them to use, or are basically just what were were looking for around the time we got them. The 10% Rampart mitigation at level 2 does nothing for a GLD at its point of acquisition. There's no situation at which we're going to find use for it until we're actually tanking multiple enemies, which only need occur if enemies link or someone in the party has an AoE (and even the earliest of those isn't for a while). Similarly, 51 levels, or 9 from the level cap seems an awful late point in which to add GLD/PLD's single hit burst mitigation. Every additional skill can be a way to add something to what it means to tank on your job, or recommend or allow some additional step or new paradigm in what it means to be a tank in general, and yet so many of our most identity driven abilities are given late, the basic scalar abilities (e.g. Rampart, Foresight) given too early to have a noticeable effect, and numerous other skills just provide more of the same (neither Bulwark nor Sentinel really all that different from Rampart; useful, but lackluster). If the game could just give a sense of class and job identity that much sooner, whether that involves accelerating ability acquisition in the beginning (and therefore slowing it later) or not, I think that'd help a lot with retaining trial players.

[seekified]

The requirement to plow through the story is the one biggest turnoff, from what I've seen. Even several of my friends who actually do play regularly and have done so since the open beta always sigh and complain when a patch is released and they're "forced" to skip more cutscenes. Naturally, if one doesn't want to be involved it becomes far less interesting, but the sheer scope of the ARR main story quests is an enormous wall to climb for those trying to catch up to the veterans. I don't know if a jump potion or a slimlining of the MSQ is the way to go, but they will have to do something to prevent this wall from growing even more in 4.0.