Appears more likely than not that new Stormblood areas gated by 3.5 Completion

[Vexander]

Also agree that trying to tell new players that they need to pay 60 + 16 / month + 20 (guess for jump potion) is a good first time experience, that would feel like you just got gouged.

To be fair, when I started, that happened to me. It's happened to quite a few players I know too.
$60 for the Game
$16 for the Subscription
$20 for Server Transfer to play with my friends

[bswpayton]

You honestly think it would take a few weeks to .

What do mean I see people doing this very thing right now at least gettin to the hw part, I like to play games my way and I actually stayed in novice like 4 months. Your average player is in hw after about three weeks, and then hw story really isnt even that long. Like I said I like to play a certain way I love the msq but its really not even that much to do especially if your just leveling up one job at a time.

I just started hw story recently in total Ive maybe spend three days on it and Im half way done with the 94 quest of the main hw story. SE said they are giving exp boast as well to make it even easier to level, where the problem with old content comes in is with challenging content like the primals , or the raids thats where the ghost town is not the leveling dungeons. The actual zones an areas arent dead if anything now that Im in hw the hw areas are alot more dead than arr areas, the same thing will happen with storm blood areas you will still catch more people hanging out in lomisa than anywhere else.

[bswpayton]

Everyone wants to debate. Nobody wants to look at a solution that I see no reason would not appease everyone:

"However, if it were up to me: Give everyone who purchases the expansion access to the new areas. Give everyone who purchases the expansion access to the new dungeons and ?

SE came up with their own solution tho its two paths, one is you can do the msq like people are doing it now and the other is you can buy a jump potion and skip up to 3.55. And Im sure after that it will be for each expansion after storm blood.

[Shougun]

To be fair, when I started, that happened to me. It's happened to quite a few players I know too.
$60 for the Game
$16 for the Subscription
$20 for Server Transfer to play with my friends

And how did that make you feel? Although question, why did you have to transfer-- OH, you're on Balmung XD. You had to squeeze through the tight gates lol.

Imo, that'd be a very dissuasive experience in buying/playing the game, especially if the friend isn't selling it extremely hard. Although I don't have a very good suggestion on how to fix the server transfer issue without them perhaps switching to realmless servers.. But yeah getting a to do list worth of purchases is very "ugh, really?" to me. I don't think I'm alone on that, but who knows.

Said I don't have a good solution for the server thing because if they made it too cheap (or even one time offer, like I think potions should be considered - WoW does that one) then everyone who wanted to could transfer to the already full servers and make them more explosively full than they are, people thought Aether had problems before? Welcome to the real void!

[loreleidiangelo]

"However, if it were up to me: Give everyone who purchases the expansion access to the new areas. Give everyone who purchases the expansion access to the new dungeons and raids (upon reaching the appropriate level). Take out all cutscenes in the dungeons / raids for players who have not played through the story. Gate the new players from the trials. Gate the new players from the valuable daily roulettes until they do finish the story (providing some incentive to play through the 200+ hours of old content). In my opinion; that is how it should be. Give the new player the opportunity to play up-to-date content in between the hours they will trudge through the old content."

Who has a problem with this? Why?

Square has a problem with this, because it would require re-coding how their MSQ system flags content, and they would lose money from story skip/level boost potions that they would earn otherwise. There's your answer.

[Vivi_Bushido]

I don't like the box art.
That red background does not go well with the PS4 blue frame.
http://i.imgur.com/Mq0TN21.jpg

[Stormfur]

I think the jump potion on release puts you at 60 (at least one of them does) so you have to do a few Heavensward quests before you can do Stormblood.

[Theodric]

Clearly, you've never joined an MMO multiple expacs deep. At some point, it gets boring going through a ghost town MMO while you wait to hit the content people are playing.

FF14 is designed so that older content remains relevant beyond its debut which is different to, say, WoW where early/mid level zones are neglected completely and there's no reason for high level places to head there. Plus if people pick a server that is very quiet then naturally it's going to feel dead.

[seraf]

Clearly, you've never joined an MMO multiple expacs deep. At some point, it gets boring going through a ghost town MMO while you wait to hit the content people are playing.

I remember the ghost towns from FFXI when I got into it. Everyone was in some other part of the game I had no access to. I don't wish to see this game suffer that same fate. So far though SE has done a good job at keeping content scattered so you always see people even in the starter towns.

[Gumbercules]

long as you have access to the job i think ill work, the gripe i feel ppl had with HW was that you had to do everything in 2.x series to even get access to the new jobs which quite frankly was a bad call. If you could get access to the jobs from 30 for example you could do the rest o the story on you pref job, but instead if you wanted to really sink your teeth into drk for example you had to clear 10+ hours of msq after lvl cap and then ahve access to said jobs. I mean alot of ppl opt in to play mmos after an xpac delivers based on jobs/classes offered for said xpac. (even with the new ones being lvl 50 for example, you will have access to them considerably faster than HW ones as a new player for example.)