Naoki Yoshida's Comment in Regard to Jump Potions/Boost Potions

[bswpayton]

This is no single player game. It's a game where you play with other people, and it's only natural to want to run content with everyone else.

Wouldnt say its exactly natural its more so your forced to run content with everyone else are suffer the consequences of being late to the party. Some people may not want to skip anything but sense this is a community based game there are hurdles to falling behind.

[RaijinSupreme]

This is no single player game. It's a game where you play with other people, and it's only natural to want to run content with everyone else.

This seems to be a hard thing for people to comprehend.

FFXIV as a single player game would be the absolute worst single player game ever created. I couldn't imagine playing this game by myself for its entirety. The appeal of this game, you know since it is a MMO and everything, is playing it with other people, and most people will be doing Stormblood stuff.

Just let them play stormblood. Like... just let them do it lol.

[Jandor]

This is no single player game.

The MSQ pretty much is. Outside of dungeons (where bots would work just fine as party members) interaction with other players is not needed and sometimes not even wanted.

Just let them play stormblood. Like... just let them do it lol.

Sure, don't see why they should be charged extra for that though.

[RaijinSupreme]

Sure, don't see why they should be charged extra for that though.

Most MMO's do give one free jump potion to new players and charges them for more if they want more.

Since the jump potion wasn't actually confirmed, we don't know if the first one will be free or not. They may, they may not, but at least the option would be there.

[szalkerous]

Blame Western impatience all you fancy but people aren't going to play through four years worth of content to unlock the relevant stuff. This issue is only magnified further on smaller servers-- where old city hubs are literal ghost towns.

Just to pull a particular point I want to comment on...

I can't speak for other servers. But on Excalibur, there's population in all hub cities.

Also, the idea of Wonderous Tails, Roulettes, and special drops from older dungeons (relic weapon requirements, crafting ingredients, etc.), ...heck even throw in mounts from Trials... all are to keep the older content stocked with willing players for those who are leveling through them. Tome bonus for first-timers are another example. These are awesome ideas that work.

The potion is a lazy button, and the problem is that it invalidates all the content it skips--preventing someone from going back and running much of it outside of what falls into the DF. It's designed to literally give someone instant "current expansion" gratification and gear without any of the progression that led up to it. These players will not stay active. They will burn whatever content they can, not care about their contribution because there's no risk, and then eventually say "screw this game, I'm bored." and leave. This isn't helping grow any community. It's a cash grab. Period.

[szalkerous]

If this potion was to level to 50 only, and stay "current minus two", perhaps I'd feel better about it. But pushing someone straight to new expansion content is a terrible idea for the rest of us. This would force a new player to at least clear one expansion of content and prove their mettle before being thrust into the current population of progressing players.

In any case, allowing players to jump past content with their wallet is still unfair "pay-to-be-better"... or maybe "pay-to-gain-an-unfair-advantage" (because apparently "pay-to-win" can't possibly mean anything but one thing) because some players won't have the money to afford to do so (see note below) and will not only be forced to run all the content, they'll be denied other players to help run it, and you WILL get the ghost town effect. I know a lot of gamers will be turned off by this and not even give it their attention. There's more negative here than positive.

Note: Current prices on Steam as of today are $29.98 for ARR+HW, then $13/$15 for subscription to provide access to the shop = $45, then adding on whatever cost of potions (Assuming $25 each) would bring this to almost $100.

[Nestama]

Isn't Excalibur a fairly populated server? Bourne was specifically talking about servers like Zalera.
They'd have to buy the Skip Potion to actually gain access to Stormblood. Level Boost only boosts your level (and it might not be available until 4.1 or even later), while the Story Skipper skips you to... HW, I think?

You're only seeing more negatives because you're making hyperboles. You assume the worst in the FFXIV community (won't help newbies) and imply that most players will use the boost.

[szalkerous]

Isn't Excalibur a fairly populated server? Bourne was specifically talking about servers like Zalera.
They'd have to buy the Skip Potion to actually gain access to Stormblood. Level Boost only boosts your level (and it might not be available until 4.1 or even later), while the Story Skipper skips you to... HW, I think?

You're only seeing more negatives because you're making hyperboles. You assume the worst in the FFXIV community (won't help newbies) and imply that most players will use the boost.

Excalibur may be one of the more populated servers, I honestly don't know as it's the only server I play on. That would only serve to emphasize my point.

The jump potions are effectively both the same problem when discussing new players, since a level jump without a story jump doesn't get you much, and a story jump without the level to support it would be useless as well. It's been said on the first post that when Stormblood is released you will be jumped straight to it, circumventing hundreds of hours of content and leveling player experience.

I assume what I do because I'm realistic and I can be objective. I've played other MMOs that took these sort of opportunistic grabs for money (cash shop advantages) and I've seen how it was the beginning of the end for many of them in the West. The worst case scenario would be one where this causes a massive breakdown of the population and destroys the community of real active players due to frustrations, and I'm not pointing at that. But I'm certainly not going to assume this brings anything positive to the table until I see something of any real substantial value.

As far as I read it so far, knowing what we know, this is nothing but a cash grab and a dilution of the population, while putting another burden and disadvantage to new players who want to actually play the whole game properly.

If this was a magic "level an alt" situation I'd really be in support of it, since we all just simply grind our alts as fast as possible (although I personally run all the class/job quests and do not use PotD for leveling).

[Blackbird1]

RIP FFXIV

Good luck SE, I will not buy the expansion now.

d'aww pumpkin....if you dont want your account we'll take free of charge of course. I for one thank SE and yoshi this will help my alts plus i've had friends even a cousin that wanted to get into ARR but they were turned off by the length of story content if they were to catch up to me to enjoy current content before going back to do it on an alt to exp the story normally now they can do both

[szalkerous]

d'aww pumpkin....if you dont want your account we'll take free of charge of course. I for one thank SE and yoshi this will help my alts plus i've had friends even a cousin that wanted to get into ARR but they were turned off by the length of story content if they were to catch up to me to enjoy current content before going back to do it on an alt to exp the story normally now they can do both

You're really not doing a great job of selling a positive standpoint on this. "We're lazy and don't want to put any effort in to level or play the game as it was intended. Thanks Square!"

Do people forget most other MMOs require you to do a separate alt character, the entire story and level process from scratch for each class? Leveling other classes/jobs in this game is already a slip n' slide once you've cleared the content once.

But I will agree that refusing to buy the expansion has really no bearing here. Hold off on that for when the nuclear "Free to play" option starts popping up. That is a game killer 100%. This is just a scenario of smoke and mirrors, cash grabs, and unfair advantages.