New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Penthea]

1)do you remember what the msq consists of?

its mostly talking to npcs in various locations and watching cutscenes. Some times you fight a small number of instanced monsters designed to be soloed by someone of that level. Following your friend around while they watch cutscenes, and one shotting the occaisional easy monster isnt really a great group experience.

No it's not designed for a group but by your other posts you made it sound like it was impossible for a group. It's not. If you want to accompany someone doing the msq, you can. If you want to help them do their quests, you can.

But you know, you could just make an alt character or use an alt class to play with your friend. What's wrong with doing that? Or are you one of those people who MUST play their main?

2)queuing for content isnt needed if you have friends, thats one of the big advantages to friends, not sure why you are bringing that up.

Because you need a specific number of friends to do it unless you plan on doing it unsynced. You need three more for dungeons and seven for trials. So if you have only two friends and don't want to unsync, you gotta queue.

The best way to play with your friend, based on the way msq is integrated, is not to play with them except when they need an instance. The best advice is; just do MSQ, let me know if you need help. Because they will still have to do MSQ no matter how much exp/gear/etc they get. Playing with you in side content only puts them further behind the timetable.

I agree but you kept harping on about how the msq quests are some massive wall literally preventing you and your buddies from playing together, and I was telling you it's not. You can accompany them if you want to.

playing with friends who have done msq, and those who havent is like night and day. You can go anywhere, and do anything you need effeciently, with all of your time. Leveling a new job? super fast, yall can play together the whole time, fates, dungeons, potd. You can hunt gear. Playing with someone doing msq, is mostly not playing with them.

You mean playing with people who have reached high lvl and those who have not. WoW does not have a msq but it didn't mean you could do everything together regardless of lvl. You cannot for the simple fact that low lvl players don't have much content unlocked. Unless you count spamming the same few dungeons over and over again as a wealth of content.

The game makes people choose between playing with friends or doing story, the pressure of which increases the more content there is between the two.

If there was no msq it wouldn't change the fact that low lvl players don't have much content unlocked so I don't see the point of this at all.

And many players do not feel the incentive to skip any of that even if they're a new player among friends who have been playing for years. A lot of players love that the game has both legitimate single player and multi-player aspects to it. Don't make sweeping statements like that. Not everyone feels the same.

ffxi was a lot freer in this respect. GW1 and gw2 both are excellent at having a lot of story, but being very easy for people to play together or do story on thier own schedules.

Well, newsflash; this is a different game. The story is central to the whole game. It makes sense to have to work through it given how it is written. If it was optional then it wouldn't be central, so then the game would no longer be the same.