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

[Mallagant]

Honestly, while these points are valid, the same could be said for ANY new game, or players looking for something new. There will always be gripes, but, as far as gripes go, these are relatively minor.
I'm speaking as someone who literally just started playing the game this passed Saturday, out of boredom, and bought it on Sunday.
I have been gaming since 1999 when EQ came out. Dedicated over a decade of time hardcore raiding there before moving over to WoW. Have been there since classic, right before BC. Have tried many games in between, including this one, multiple times. For the last few weeks, I have been playing Project 99, and have enjoyed the hell out of it. For some reason, on Saturday, I decided to try this for the 4th time or so. I actually gave it a solid shot. Went passed level 5, and found myself really enjoying it. Enough to buy it. Less then a week in, I am almost 30, and have actually considered calling out of work a couple of times to stay home and play. I haven't felt that since the first day I started playing EQ.
For me, the hardest part about starting this game, and why it took 4 attempts, is the text. WAY to much text to just start out in a game. I have since seen cutscenes with voice acting, and that should be implemented in the beginning. SLOWLY introduce people to all of the text that is a part of this game, let them get used to it at a pace, instead of BAM, right off the bat, here is a 500k word essay for you to read before you can swing your sword once.
Once a person can get passed that, this game is actually very engaging. I'm loving the story line (yeah, even that completely random, VERY weird appearance guy with the comb and scissors), the people seem to be way more friendly, the chat isn't cluttered with horrific stupidity (quite the opposite, most times chat is a ghost town), the scenery is gorgeous, and as a transmog/glamour junkie, there is TONS of eye candy to go around, and that alone makes me want to get high level to get me some of that gorgeous armor.

[InkstainedGwyn]

Honestly, while these points are valid, the same could be said for ANY new game, or players looking for something new.

This ^. To be fair, I get the complaint, there's a lot of story going on in this game - but that's one of the big "features" of XIV. Because... look at the current content. People are complaining that we don't get enough MSQ with each patch, yet it's "too much" for new players to go through. You can't really have it both ways without them creating two versions - a "novel" for the max-level bored players, and the "cliff notes" for the new players.

The big issue here is that XIV locks most of their content behind the MSQ - you can't just say "screw it" and ignore the story, power level to 70 and jump into Eureka/Omega/Ivalice. Maybe that's a bad thing, but at the same time, I like having content that's bound to story in a way that wouldn't make sense if you just dove in without doing the content. Now, I know that's not the primary reason they gate things - they want to force people to prolong the life of the game - but it doesn't change the fact that I prefer the way XIV does it to a vast majority of other games.

Nor would I want them to cut back on content that exists just so that future players can speed to max level, and I'd be very sad if all of the MSQ was boiled down within an expansion or two, because I like going back through particularly meaningful moments with alts (and eventually the "replay" feature they're going to add.)