Castrum Meridianum is ruined.

[Rufalus]

I'm tired of hearing about new players getting upset and/or quitting game after bad experiences in ARR content. This is a really good game but we're losing people all the time before they reach the best stuff. I think it should be quite a high priority to adjust the early game experience, at least piece by piece in patches so it doesn't divert much resources away from new content.

CM & Prae in particular should have been altered long ago... at a mininum just place a warning when they are unlocked and added to duty finder which says many cutscenes will play during this duty and it's recommended to form a party with likeminded players who have time to watch. A better but more resource-intensive solution would be completely reworking and rebalancing those instances, and add new rewards like glamor/minions to them to justify the rework so existing players can get some value out of them.

As for the pre-HW msq quest slog, just change as many filler quests into sidequests as possible to make them optional. One more option is to make an expansion that is largely about revisiting ARR zones and roll all the reworking old stuff into that xpac alongside improving the zones. Add flight and swim, extended sections bolted onto the old maps which are only accessible by flight or new msq, with high-level enemies suitable for the new level cap.

[Blanchimont]

I'm tired of hearing about new players getting upset and/or quitting game after bad experiences in ARR content. This is a really good game but we're losing people all the time before they reach the best stuff. I think it should be quite a high priority to adjust the early game experience, at least piece by piece in patches so it doesn't divert much resources away from new content.

Its not just ARR. The entire MSQ is problematic considering how many hundreds of quests you have to get through now. It's only going to get worse with each patch. I know we're around 550 MSQs already.

[Nezerius]

Its not just ARR. The entire MSQ is problematic considering how many hundreds of quests you have to get through now. It's only going to get worse with each patch. I know we're around 550 MSQs already.

Except it is just ARR. HW doesn't have nearly as many filler quests as ARR does.

[Blanchimont]

Except it is just ARR. HW doesn't have nearly as many filler quests as ARR does.

It doesn't matter if its filler or not. The daunting task of having to complete 500+ MSQs in order to enjoy the end game content is way too much to ask of new players. Here's a game, but you have to do 40+ hrs of quests first.

I don't think going through the MSQ is a problem. I call it playing the game - the fun part of the game.
Eventually you run out of quests and reach the end of the game which seems to consist mostly of running boring dungeons over and over and over again.

It was fun in the beginning, but the more you have the more tedious it becomes and the bigger the barrier to entry becomes and it will only get harder to find people to do dungeons with you as well as players are scattered across a larger and larger area. The 500 quests will easily take someone over two months to do. That is two months they have to invest before they can even get a chance at the end game provided they manage to reach that point at the beginning of a new equipment cycle.

[MistakeNot]

It doesn't matter if its filler or not. The daunting task of having to complete 500+ MSQs in order to enjoy the end game content is way too much to ask of new players. Here's a game, but you have to do 40+ hrs of quests first.

Tastes differ. My point was that the MSQ (and associated sidequests) is the game as far as I am concerned. The so-called "end game" is just filler content until we get more story - and not something I really care about.
Dungeons and raids can be fun - the first time you make it through them. Subsequent runs quickly become a boring grind.

[MistakeNot]

Its not just ARR. The entire MSQ is problematic considering how many hundreds of quests you have to get through now. It's only going to get worse with each patch. I know we're around 550 MSQs already.

I don't think going through the MSQ is a problem. I call it playing the game - the fun part of the game.
Eventually you run out of quests and reach the end of the game which seems to consist mostly of running boring dungeons over and over and over again.