A Realm Reborn Revamp / Lack of Race Diversity / Class locked glamours

[Allegor]

My bf is just about to finish 2.0. He really wants to try out MCH and AST but I don't have the heart to tell him about 2.1-2.55 in fear he'd quit.

[Yoshihara]

My bf is just about to finish 2.0. He really wants to try out MCH and AST but I don't have the heart to tell him about 2.1-2.55 in fear he'd quit.

Never forget you are Tataru's errand boy now and forever

[-Teria-]

Ways to make it less terrible.

1: Add an aetheryte right outside The Waking Sands
2: Have Minfillia be more willing to divulge information over the linkpearl.
3: Delete the entire company of heroes questline and just have people jump right to Titan. Rewrite that entire section if you have to. Nothing was more infuriating than going all over Eorzea to do a bunch of bullcrap for these people only for it to end up being for a party for me that I never asked for or wanted anyway.
4: Remove the need for company seals to get your Chocobo. Just get people that bird as fast as possible so the slow sloooow walking goes away as quickly as possible. The seals are a formality anyway.
5: Just flat out delete some of the side quests that serve no purpose but unlocking key features that just exist from the get go in every other MMO. We really, really don't need quests just to unlock the ability to glamour armor or cut our hair. That should just be available.
6: Revamp Thousand Maws of Totorak. Shorten the dungeon. Start it further in. Remove that leaden crap off the floor. That dungeon is hated by old and new players alike. I can't think of anyone who has ever said they actually like that place. I'm so convinced that it's impossible for a human to enjoy that dungeon, that for someone to claim that they do must mean they're an alien trying to imitate human emotions and failing miserably.
7: More low level actions. Rework a lot of the melee combo buttons into ranks if you need to. A new player would rather hit 4 weak buttons that combo into one big button at level 20 than sit there hitting two buttons. It Needs. More. Buttons. Especially now that ranks auto-upgrade when necessary.
8: My Fiesty Little Chocobo. Lower the level requirement. 30 is unacceptable now. The boring, dull drudgery of pre-ARR is made better when you've got your Chocobro to keep you company, kwehing and warking in your ear with promises that things will get better if you just stick together.
9: Increase the ARR story experience even more. Double it if you need to. Whatever it takes to get people through as quickly as possible.
10: Add actual dialogue options to the fetch quests where players can basically say "No. I'm not doing that." to NPCs, which allows them to skip much of the fetching, but remove gil rewards from the quests. This now gives the players a choice. Do this fetch quest and get paid, or skip that nonsense and move on with your life. At that point, the tedium is of the player's own choosing and not thrust upon them. This is especially necessary in the post 2.0, pre 3.0 patch quests where you're now a big hero and there are plenty of other lower Scions that Tataru or whoever can just say "Oh, you're busy...Well. I suppose I can ask Hoary to do it. He seems eager enough. Anyway, about that Primal-"

Bonus: Enable NPC marriage, but lock it behind ARR story completion.
Don't underestimate the power of using waifus and husbandos as the carrot on a stick to get a large subset of players to suffer through the story.

[Penthea]

1: Add an aetheryte right outside The Waking Sands

There is an important lore reason discussed by the scions as to why there is no aetheryte in that town. What SE could do instead is have quest cutscenes teleport you to your next destination. Many in the game do this already. I think they could also add Vesper Bay as a destination for more than one ship as well. Right now it's only the boat from the Arcanist's Guild. No reason why other ships couldn't expand their routes.

2: Have Minfillia be more willing to divulge information over the linkpearl.

This one is fair, but it would only work when the conversation is just you and Minfilia. It could get confusing if more characters are added to the conversation. Unless SE change the chatbox to make it clearer when someone else is talking when you have no other visual aid.

3: Delete the entire company of heroes questline and just have people jump right to Titan. Rewrite that entire section if you have to. Nothing was more infuriating than going all over Eorzea to do a bunch of bullcrap for these people only for it to end up being for a party for me that I never asked for or wanted anyway.

That isn't the only time the company of heroes are in the game. If you entirely delete your introduction to them, later encounters with them will either not make much sense or they won't have the intended impact. Also removing that questline would remove Brayflox's Longstop, which is a dungeon.

4: Remove the need for company seals to get your Chocobo. Just get people that bird as fast as possible so the slow sloooow walking goes away as quickly as possible. The seals are a formality anyway.

The seals absolutely do not slow down chocobo acquisition. 200 seals is nothing. Most players have beyond that by the time they need to get a chocobo and if they don't it's very fast to farm. It used to be 2000 seals. SE have already addressed chocobo acquisition speed. On top of that players can rent chocobo porters either as a taxi or as a temporary mount they can control. You don't have to run all the time if you use the services the game gives you. I'm saying this as a player who has several alts.

5: Just flat out delete some of the side quests that serve no purpose but unlocking key features that just exist from the get go in every other MMO. We really, really don't need quests just to unlock the ability to glamour armor or cut our hair. That should just be available.

Giving new players too many features can be overwhelming, and there is something to be said about earning things instead of having them handed to you with no effort. What SE should do is have the glamour and dye quests located near Gridania, Limsa and Ul'Dah so that you won't be forced to unlock the features later simply because your starting city is not Ul'Dah.

6: Revamp Thousand Maws of Totorak. Shorten the dungeon. Start it further in. Remove that leaden crap off the floor. That dungeon is hated by old and new players alike. I can't think of anyone who has ever said they actually like that place. I'm so convinced that it's impossible for a human to enjoy that dungeon, that for someone to claim that they do must mean they're an alien trying to imitate human emotions and failing miserably.

I hate this dungeon but I'd honestly prefer to see SE spend time creating new content than revamp an old dungeon that is already super easy just for the sake of convenience. That said maybe SE need to change their roulette algorithm because people get this dungeon A LOT even if everyone in the party is 50+.

7: More low level actions. Rework a lot of the melee combo buttons into ranks if you need to. A new player would rather hit 4 weak buttons that combo into one big button at level 20 than sit there hitting two buttons. It Needs. More. Buttons. Especially now that ranks auto-upgrade when necessary.

The problem with this is that by giving low lvl players more abilities, you would be making higher lvl players get more extra ranks and less new abilities. Extra ranks are boring unless they change how you use the ability. And even then they're still nowhere near as exciting as being given a whole new button to press. The higher lvls are already riddled with extra ranks and traits. Replacing even more abilities with those would really cheapen the idea of your character getting stronger.

Don't get me wrong, I find ruin spam extremely dull, but there comes a point in which you need to accept the fact that being low lvl means you don't have access to a lot of abilities.

8: My Fiesty Little Chocobo. Lower the level requirement. 30 is unacceptable now. The boring, dull drudgery of pre-ARR is made better when you've got your Chocobro to keep you company, kwehing and warking in your ear with promises that things will get better if you just stick together.

I find lvl 30 to be a logical choice. By then you have already spent a lot of time with your chocobo. You know each other better. At the same time you become high enough lvl to get your first job stone. Lvl 30 is a big combat milestone because it's when you start leaving the novice stage behind as both an adventurer and a chocobo handler.

However I wouldn't be opposed to the lvl requirement being lowered. I'm merely stating that the current requirement does make sense.

9: Increase the ARR story experience even more. Double it if you need to. Whatever it takes to get people through as quickly as possible.

There's only two points in which you might end up having the next msq quest be higher lvl than you are. And that doesn't happen all the time either especially if the player did a lot of side quests and their roulettes. By increasing the xp by as much as you say you could be dooming players to be lvl 55 and still stuck in ARR. I lvled up my first character in HW and I was lvl 52 by the time I actually got to 3.0 content, and that was without any sort of xp boosts.

10: Add actual dialogue options to the fetch quests where players can basically say "No. I'm not doing that." to NPCs, which allows them to skip much of the fetching, but remove gil rewards from the quests. This now gives the players a choice. Do this fetch quest and get paid, or skip that nonsense and move on with your life. At that point, the tedium is of the player's own choosing and not thrust upon them. This is especially necessary in the post 2.0, pre 3.0 patch quests where you're now a big hero and there are plenty of other lower Scions that Tataru or whoever can just say "Oh, you're busy...Well. I suppose I can ask Hoary to do it. He seems eager enough. Anyway, about that Primal-"

For 2.0 would be better if SE just consolidated a lot of those trivial quests that have cutscenes that teleport you to your next destination, like I said earlier in the post. This would be better than having the option of being sassy and losing out on xp and gil.

As for 3.0+ you're forgetting that a great deal of npcs have no idea who you are. You may be a big shot in some of Eorzea but you're a stranger to them.

Also I believe the scions themselves would be heavily opposed to the term "lower scions". They already have their own jobs anyway. You think Tataru is on holiday in Kugane? Hoary Boulder just wears the armour for show?

Bonus: Enable NPC marriage, but lock it behind ARR story completion.
Don't underestimate the power of using waifus and husbandos as the carrot on a stick to get a large subset of players to suffer through the story.

Considering how story-driven this game is...no this would be bad. This would open SE to backlash if something happened to characters, such as death or personality change. Never mind if SE have plans to make said characters to fall for a npc instead. Leave the marriage to npcs to player created copies of them or fan art.

[Legion88]

Ways to make it less terrible.

1: Add an aetheryte right outside The Waking Sands

Good Option.

2: Have Minfillia be more willing to divulge information over the linkpearl.

Good option.

3: Delete the entire company of heroes questline and just have people jump right to Titan. Rewrite that entire section if you have to. Nothing was more infuriating than going all over Eorzea to do a bunch of bullcrap for these people only for it to end up being for a party for me that I never asked for or wanted anyway.

The result of this arc is bad but the arc in itself is an important part of trials for recognition.

4: Remove the need for company seals to get your Chocobo. Just get people that bird as fast as possible so the slow sloooow walking goes away as quickly as possible. The seals are a formality anyway.

This is more or less already done by giving the needed seals for joining the GCs.

5: Just flat out delete some of the side quests that serve no purpose but unlocking key features that just exist from the get go in every other MMO. We really, really don't need quests just to unlock the ability to glamour armor or cut our hair. That should just be available.

I don't think this should be done.
They should introduce a basic version of this features, like glamouring via Prisms and basic post creation character costumisation, through the first MSQ and then set up siede quests to upgrade this features to the full version we have now.

6: Revamp Thousand Maws of Totorak. Shorten the dungeon. Start it further in. Remove that leaden crap off the floor. That dungeon is hated by old and new players alike. I can't think of anyone who has ever said they actually like that place. I'm so convinced that it's impossible for a human to enjoy that dungeon, that for someone to claim that they do must mean they're an alien trying to imitate human emotions and failing miserably.

I like this place. The leaden crap is annoying, but that's the only thing i would wish to change in this dungeon.

7: More low level actions. Rework a lot of the melee combo buttons into ranks if you need to. A new player would rather hit 4 weak buttons that combo into one big button at level 20 than sit there hitting two buttons. It Needs. More. Buttons. Especially now that ranks auto-upgrade when necessary.

This is one of my personal complaines.
In my opinion the skill acquisation in the low leveling range schould give most skills, except specific job quest skills, before the first couple of dungeons and then only expand them by traits.

8: My Fiesty Little Chocobo. Lower the level requirement. 30 is unacceptable now. The boring, dull drudgery of pre-ARR is made better when you've got your Chocobro to keep you company, kwehing and warking in your ear with promises that things will get better if you just stick together.

In my opinion this schould be a straight follow up to the chocobo acquisition quest.

9: Increase the ARR story experience even more. Double it if you need to. Whatever it takes to get people through as quickly as possible.

There is no problem in lack of experience gained through the MSQ of ARR.

10: Add actual dialogue options to the fetch quests where players can basically say "No. I'm not doing that." to NPCs, which allows them to skip much of the fetching, but remove gil rewards from the quests. This now gives the players a choice. Do this fetch quest and get paid, or skip that nonsense and move on with your life. At that point, the tedium is of the player's own choosing and not thrust upon them. This is especially necessary in the post 2.0, pre 3.0 patch quests where you're now a big hero and there are plenty of other lower Scions that Tataru or whoever can just say "Oh, you're busy...Well. I suppose I can ask Hoary to do it. He seems eager enough. Anyway, about that Primal-"

The problem is there is not very much you can cut out. You can cut out some unneccessary running forward and back and most of that is already covered with point 2.

Bonus: Enable NPC marriage, but lock it behind ARR story completion.
Don't underestimate the power of using waifus and husbandos as the carrot on a stick to get a large subset of players to suffer through the story.

How I hate the waifunisation of games, but besides this, which NPC schould be available. You can only create specific waifu/husbando charakters just for this purpose, every exiting waifu/husbando material is to tied up in the story and events to be available for this.