Is old content worth remastering? If so, how do we warrant the development costs?

[Shurrikhan]

The developers really need to take a critical eye to the 2.x MSQ because I don't think they understand how bad it is. A "split" in the story sounds interesting, but it would be easier just to relegate the quests to being on the side. Up until Ultima, there's a lot of tedious and annoying quests, but from what I've seen, it's tolerable to new players. It's later on where people tend to lose interest and quit, but that doesn't mean the entirety of the 2.x story could use some work. I'm really wondering the player retention rate past Ultima and before Heavensward.

The main suggestions I see for improving the apparent quality of the MSQ and 1-50 player retention as a whole are the above optional trimming, the inclusion of a free and preaimed teleport button on the MSQ pane (the one in top-right corner by default), and -- though indirect -- earlier ability acquisition, better in-game support tools for learning, better difficulty tuning, and open-world content.

[One_Time]

The AAR MSQ is a barrier for entry for many new players. The skip-potions are not ideal, and losing players to the AAR MSQ means losing money. I would justify development on cutting the filler out of the MSQ as streamlining the story in order to get more new players to see SB2. Sort of like a Dragon Ball Z Kai if you will. This is especially important for those that wish to play an alt with the new race. Alt players would be more sensitive to the time-wasters in the MSQ.

I read through the majority if not all posts in this thread, I don't understand why skip-potions were ruled out so quickly. If they are not ideal then explain why they are not ideal. SE gave us a way to skip MSQ of past expansions (I would personally rather have the XP and rewards). If a player wants to go that route then great, but the story is good and I don't know how you cut out "filler" in MSQ. I've leveled several characters and while it is an arduous journey that may turn off new players, I feel it is completely necessary. Yes, even the events in Costa leading up to Titan.

[RareItems]

They should just Remaster everything in 5.0. Leave everything as it is for everything else lol. They could then decide if it's worth remastering the rest.

Then feel the customer feedback and go from there .

[Merceus]

I am of the opinion that old content doesn't need to be remastered.

I do think that older content needs to be less restricted and streamlined with better rewards. The biggest thing I dislike is when I level sync, I lose the abilities I would have above that level. Make it so once we learn something, we have it always!

Leves shouldn't have allowances, MSQ should drop all filler quests, FATEs from 1-60 should give more exp/gil/seals + a percentage increase based on how many people are doing it, and being in a party in the open world content should give increased drop rates/exp. Give us daily FATE rewards. Give us daily party rewards for completing X amount of Y things with the same group. Give us daily "find the location in Z area" stuff for exp. Make Guildhests worth completing in any capacity.

[Liam_Harper]

The 1-50 MSQ experience definitely needs to be reworked.

It's embarrasing to invite friends to the game and have to continually convince them "it gets better in HW!" as they slog through Titans dinner and report to Minfilia for the 108th time. That includes the combat, having a minimal rotation and barely any ogcd's until 60+, or worse 3 buttons and no aoe in lv30 dungeons. No doubt it's terrible for business too, from what I see on other MMO forums that bring up ff14, the majority quit before 50 because "the questing was boring" or "the combat is awful".

Initial impressions are vital to a games success. They need to invest in that.

[MicahZerrshia]

It needs to be cut and edited heavily and the msq dungeons need a trust system or a solo version. Also dungeons like brayflox just need taken out completely...they are just a waste of time and a needless roadblock just like all the little fetch quests, that banquet leading up to titanm for instance, is p.a.i.n.f.u.l and they could just remove a lot of that or condense it into just a quick quest or 2.

All expacs should just be their own thing too. This continuing story is not good for the longrun and we need new protagonists and antagonists. The redundancy in the story is becoming as bad as the redundancy of the patches. The Dragonsong War and the Doma should both have not included the Scions, Ascians or Empire. Let them have their own identity. That would solve a lot of the new player boredom as well. In other games you can tackle expacs and add ons in any order, for the most part and that would be wonderful here.

Outside of that, if you mean remastering as in textures and what not...nothing needs to be redone unless it will be relevant again. And SE, from all accounts, made the huge mistake of making low quality graphics straight away instead of high quality ones and then scaling them down like most developers do. So they would have to completely rework everything and that is just not worth doing for content that ppl only do for completion or kicks at this point.

[Shougun]

I think the MSQ needs it for sure lol, as many people said. I'm quite fond of the "all the side, go make a soup" content is put into side optional main story side quests and all the important ones are kept.

This is not a very important one but imo if they could script wipe mechanics as "if current content = wipe raid, if entering unsynced and not current then instead deal very heavy damage". Kind of funny when you are flicking monsters way stronger than some of the old old primals but because you damaged them too hard solo that they wipe you when it seems to me you could just tank their ultimate to the face (if we were considering power levels lol).

I believe, and this might not really count as a remaster, but they could introduce things to do in the old zones - a chocobo hot and cold game (like WoW's archaeology, except better and also I'm not saying WoW made it first - it's just an example). Even if they don't add flying I think they could add some chocobo "if you have flying mount" jump points for unique treasures, leves, new quests, lookout points, etc. Speaking of leves perhaps adding more into that system like once or twice a week you can use a super leve that has some serious rewards and can take you anywhere in the game (including old areas, perhaps most commonly old areas).

[Edax]

I read through the majority if not all posts in this thread, I don't understand why skip-potions were ruled out so quickly. If they are not ideal then explain why they are not ideal. SE gave us a way to skip MSQ of past expansions (I would personally rather have the XP and rewards). If a player wants to go that route then great, but the story is good and I don't know how you cut out "filler" in MSQ. I've leveled several characters and while it is an arduous journey that may turn off new players, I feel it is completely necessary. Yes, even the events in Costa leading up to Titan.

For one, there are important parts of the AAR MSQ story that should be experienced. A skip potion would only introduce confusion to those experiencing the later stories. It is not ideal.
I for one, do not think the shenanigans of Tataru Taru, or Hoary Boulder & friends are completely "necessary" (and there were oh so many shenanigans). While funny, they don't belong in the mandatory MSQ, much like how the Hildibrand quests are not part of the MSQ either.

Out of curiosity, how would you feel about limited availability sidequests? For instance, let's say the MSQ at certain junctures breaks into two paths. The first leads you straight on to the next major event, seemingly seamlessly. The second runs the original path--or maybe even builds further upon it for the benefit of New Game+ runners--fleshing out side-characters and locales where such a quest would make no sense further into the "core" MSQ plot? (Even then you'd probably want to trim some of the (fetid) fat, but care would be taken not to dry the burger in the process unless someone likes it so or would rather have the burger and be off than enjoy it.)

Additionally, I'm curious what you'd think about an optional account-wide Armory Bonus.

I think a split would be good idea. The MSQ filler has some merit because they are character moments, but they are also very poorly paced and slow the story to a crawl. As I recall, we do have somewhat of a split in Stormblood, in that you gain the quest from Tataru Taru to unlock the Hell's Lid duty as a part of the MSQ, but the whole quest chain itself is optional, so that new players going through Stormblood can just skip it when they head towards Shadowbringers. The same can be applied to MSQ AAR, with the quests always there for you to do them and are unlocked as part of the AAR MSQ story, but are detached from the MSQ itself.

As for an account-wide Armory Bonus, it's a bit tricky because family members might be sharing the same account. The story is paced for the player without the bonus so it could be a problem if a family member's character is already max level, causing all other characters to over-level in the story.

[Makeda]

I would support a revision on the order of the One Tamriel update to ESO:

- remove all zone access barriers.
- scale every zone to level 70 iLevel 290
- scale ever character to level 70 iLevel 290 when outside of a raid or expert content.
- Make MSQ optional (ie: remove it as a prereq to any zone, dungeon, trial, raid, etc.
- Give a 5% exp and Gil bonus to MSQ quests to encourage still doing them.

For ESO this had the result of making a game that was dying and near shutdown become the #2, possibly #1 MMO outside of China (WoW becomes dramatically smaller once you stop counting it’s Chinese players, and if you do count the Chinese players then you need ti compare it againdt Lineage which is at least 10x bigger than WoW...).

If not the above then I would leave ot alone. Go all the way to a fix or don’t do it at all. Halfway measures are what cause real issues... Cataclysm is remembered as WoW’s worst expansion because it only went halfway: remastered all that content but didn’t make it relevant. Wildstar failed because it went halfway: fixed all the raid and dungeon difficulty but didn’t address faction issues. Guild Wars likewise with its dungeons: halfway fixed by changing loot but not seeking a fuller answer to the lack of good fight design has led to the MMO not having a new dungeon added since 2013...

Halfway fixes just create more issues. Be dramatic or leave it alone.

[SaitoHikari]

The 1-50 MSQ experience definitely needs to be reworked.

It's embarrasing to invite friends to the game and have to continually convince them "it gets better in HW!" as they slog through Titans dinner and report to Minfilia for the 108th time. That includes the combat, having a minimal rotation and barely any ogcd's until 60+, or worse 3 buttons and no aoe in lv30 dungeons. No doubt it's terrible for business too, from what I see on other MMO forums that bring up ff14, the majority quit before 50 because "the questing was boring" or "the combat is awful".

Initial impressions are vital to a games success. They need to invest in that.

This, but add the level 50 pre-HW phase as well. I had a group of four friends that tried to get into the game at the end of the HW patch cycle, and literally all of them got burned out before or during the level 50 pre-HW MSQ phase. One pushed through to complete all of the MSQ all the way to Baelsar's Wall, but was so burned out at that point that they didn't even log back in for Stormblood since.

It's only going to get worse if it's left as is.