So Long, Thanks for all the Fish

[Risvertasashi]

yeah, getting an alt started is a huge time investment. Wouldn't mind a way to cut through the filler if you've already got a character at max...

Like hundreds of hours investment :/

[Gemina]

Even though I don't agree with most of the stuff the OP said, I have no issues with it save for one little tidbit:

TL;DR

FFXIV is crap for new players, dont buy it.

This is where my sympathy goes away. This is something you say when someone is directly asking you if the game is worth the purchase, and nobody asked the OP jack. As a newer player myself, FFXIV has been nothing short of amazing. Money well spent. Lord knows it can go towards worse things.

[Mugiawara]

Didn't the Dark Knight questline say something about this?
Basically them saying they are sick and tired of helping every John and Jane?

Also, people totally skipping the fact he is talking about the fetch runs.
Not the 'main' storyline per say.
I just skipped over because I wanted to get to the meat of it all.
He ain't wrong about that, it's unnecessary.
Half the stuff needs to literally be a SIDE quest AND not shoved in
the MSQ.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

The Dark Knight quests level 30 to 50 wasn't just about being everyone's errand boy; it was also about not getting respect when they actually do the tasks or how they're still treated like garbage even after everything they did.

[Atoli]

What does the level 50 FSH quest have anything to do with this? I don't recall part of the main story requiring this.

If the MSQ required fisher at 50 I would have quit this game a long time ago..

[kupokage]

I agree with OP. Friends complain about the quests first and foremost the first 2 hours into the game. I try to convince them it'll only get better and that the game really only opens up after you get to endgame. But then i realize all endgame consists of is standing around and quing for duty, waiting in que, running said duty and then repeat as needed/wanted. Then i realized i was only trying to convince myself THAT part was fun.

I stuck around after finishing 2.0 thinking it'll get better. Did not. Held on even longer for 3.0 thinking it'll get better. Not at all. Not making the same mistake waiting around for 4.0.

The only Titans I'm killing now are the humanoid nekkids that eat people. That'll entertain me into XV comes out.

[Lisotte]

So, the main complaint is "WHY can't SE let me do the content that other players did over a year in just a day, tops?!"

"We all suffered through this years ago, make the new players suffer it too!"

Really the ARR story is all over the place, completely full of filler and paper-thin. I don't know anyone who complains about leveling, but I do know plenty of people who just have better things to do in their time than gather stuff for some banquet for reasons. This is an MMORPG, not a "oh I'm going to do all these solo fetch quests and be the world's secretary for 50 hours" game.

[Derio]

Which is why I loved the dark Knight story. It complained about being the errand boy. But also explains the true value of being a hero

[LineageRazor]

To be honest, most, if not all of the "filler" fetch quests are in place to flesh out the world. To use Tataru's sledgehammer as an example, the quest isn't about getting a hammer for Tataru. It's about learning that the Scions have budget issues, that Tataru is willing to step into some new shoes to try to address the problem (and can very well get in over her head doing so), to reconnect with Forgemaster Brithael and get a reminder that the crafting guilds are actually part of the world (and not just a sidegame for players who like to craft), and so on and so forth.

While they could have just had a wall o' text explaining the Scion's money problems and that Tataru went out to try to mine up some loot to fill the coffers, and thereby bypass the fetch portion - would that really have been better? Traveling from NPC to NPC gives you the feeling that you're actually DOING something, not just reading a book. You're part of the story, not just an observer.

"We all suffered through this years ago, make the new players suffer it too!"

That's the thing, though - we DIDN'T suffer through this years ago. The extraneous fetch quests aren't NEARLY so bad when you only have to deal with them one patch at a time. They really only become onerous when there's two hundred MSQ's stretched out before you, as is the case with new players today (or folks leveling alts).

This, I think, is the real issue, here. New players want to get into the meat of the game, but the game is pretty much telling them that they need to read three novels' worth of story before they can do so. Long-time players were able to read those novels in bite-sized chunks, a bit at a time, all the while staying caught up on game content. A handful of fetch quests between you and your goal is a whole lot more palatable than a hundred or more.

Finding a good solution isn't easy. Story-skip potions have been proposed, but the problem with that is that the storyline later on becomes incomprehensible if you don't have the story leading up to it. It's only really a viable solution for folks who flat-out don't care about story at all.

The solution they went with in FFXI was parallel storylines for the expansions instead of linear: With the exception of the first expansion, all subsequent expansions had storylines that could be advanced at the same time as (or even instead of) the Main Scenario, and did not depend on events in the Main Scenario. That may not be an option in this game, though - it seems pretty evident that the next expansion is going to carry on the story from where it leaves off in Heavensward, and presumably future expansions moving forward will do the same. While Yoshi P has indicated that the next expansion will not lock ALL content behind storyline progression, I think it's safe to say that most of the endgame activities will depend on it, so the problem will still exist - and be even worse.

[Zojha]

Finding a good solution isn't easy.

It would help a tremendous lot if all non-essential quests would simply be reduced to optional sidequests. That way, if you need the XP, you can do them, if you don't, you can leave them and if at some point your interest sparks, you can do them later. We already have precedence of quests involving NPCs that would have no place being in them depending on where you are in the MSQ (DRG/CUL), so I don't think that's a good reason not to do it either.