Allow MSQ Fast Track To Latest Expansion

[Belhi]

It's amazing the number of times I've seen players say "Oh, I don't like the story in this game at all, so I just skip past all the dialog and cutscenes." If they're skipping past it, then clearly they don't even know what the story is, so how could they possibly decide whether they do or don't like it?

Anyway, if a story jump potion were ever to be added (which I hope it never is), there shouldn't be any story summary. You play through the story and find out what the story is about, or you skip it and don't. Any summary that actually covers the plotline is going to be just as long as that plotline it's replacing, since there's hardly any filler there to begin with.

As long as it doesn't impact my play experience I don't mind a summary. Something like a 'story so far' thing on the website or something that allowed you to read up summaries in chapters to get up to date would probably be a useful refresher for existing players as well as new players who skip. Such a summary wouldn't eat much into the developers time or cost a great deal. There are actually fanmade summaries already (for example The Lore Train on gamer escape or Ethys Asher's ARR abridged series). However I don't want them to bend over backwards or spend a great deal of resources accomplishing it. I certainly don't want them to draw out my current player investment in the story to accommodate others. If they want to jump in the deep end let them.

I very much doubt people are going to sign up for a subscription MMO because it now provides the option to pay extra to skip a huge chunk of it. Skipping portions of the story isn't a major problem, charging people extra to do it is though.

I am not really sold on the model they are offering. Frankly I don't really see a need for a lvl Jump potion at this point for example. I also think that it would make more sense to include a story jump potion if it was introduced with an expansion set as part of its cost rather than selling it separately as for the most part only people buying an expansion would need it.

I can however see an argument for charging for a story job potion outside of an expansion set. The existing concept of a story Jump potion is to jump you to the start of the current expansion. Currently the existing story structure does act as a blocking mechanism for a lot of RMT and bots since it actually requires a degree of playing and money investment to access the higher areas. This is probably why they chose to include HW with the expansion set rather than the base ARR game.

Content patches have stayed roughly the same size and been delivered at roughly the same rate for the entirety of the games life after relaunch, both before and after the cash shop, and despite the shops ever growing size. More money for SE means more money for SE, nothing more, nothing less. No one is doing us a favour by using the mogstation.

This isn't entirely true. As a rule trying new stuff is almost always more resource consuming than sticking to what you already are doing. In addition to that we are getting some pretty major and costly infrastructure upgrades. Note that the EU datacentre didn't become a thing until the cash shop became a thing. They even outright stated that the cash shop revenue payed for a good deal of the cost of building the EU datacentre.

Content release quantity is more limited by the availability of staff with the right skill set and experience to be hired rather than the funds involved. SE has been hiring for a while now for FF14.