Quality of Life Improvements and MSQ Gating for New Players

[Krotoan]

The MSQ ought to be condensed, especially ARR's MSQ.

Areas/Maps should not be gated behind MSQ and neither should content(eg NPCs/NPC vendors who only unlock after completing some points of MSQ.)
Would this 'break' the story? Perhaps but players entering these areas,unlocking these NPCs,could maybe get a spolier alert warning or something.

In this game that has constant complaints of "but there's nothing to do!", reducing even more content to trivial skippability would be a bad idea. Someone who layed down the money to get ARR AND HW AND SB would be cheating themselves of "content" if they just walked into the new areas, not to mention the barriers presented to botters by gating things behind expansions helps keep them out of the current player blob. Yes there's a lot of stuff you "have" to do to be current, but having a level one waltz into Shirogane isn't worth the amount of changes necessary to the game to make it happen. I wouldn't like to know that time and dev resources were devoted to that when they could be making things for the current majority. If you don't actually read the MSQ and just blitz through dungeons and cutscenes it's maybe 2 weeks of nightly work. If you don't care about story then this really isn't that great a game for you. Sure some people don't and the still play the game but the meat of this game is in the story, not the innovative gameplay , job dynamics or graphics.