New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[van_arn]

This is almost reductio ad absurdum. Youre going to an extreme to try and disprove a general point.

2.0 actually addresses most of the events in 1.0 through the 2.0 storyline, and most of 1.0 is downplayed because of it being a flop and being a semi-separate game. For all intensive purposes, 2.0 and up and pretty much a new game. The problem with your criticism is youre trying to discredit the idea of playing 2.x and gating by seeing everything as a zero sum game. You either have to do every single lore thing and part of the game, or nothing at all and everyone should skip it. This purposefully looks past nuance of the issue. Youll notice that a lot of people here do recognize 2.1-2.55 is kinda long and maybe could use some careful and considered streamlining. Because that seems like a reasonable solution to the problems people have. What some of us dont approve of is the notion that gating content that relates directly to the core of the game is a problem, and that the devs shouldnt just have people skip 2.0 all together for free if they want to. Particularly since, you know, the entirety of the game is established in 2.x content.

You dont want to do the MSQ, then buy that jump potion. It's there for that purpose. Otherwise, you should understand the game isnt set up like WoW or other MMOs. There's an order to the game thats dictated by a story. If you dont honestly like that, and the only content that matters to you is the max level content and nothing else, then maybe you should choose another MMO. This one maybe isnt for you.

That is reductio ad absurdum, intentionally so. Because requiring a new player to go through this content for the misguided "importance" of the story is equally absurd, especially when every new player is already skipping content.

There is no need to require a player to go through ARR when the trailers and the context in the game tells players all they need to know to start heavensward IN Heavensward. Offering something for sale does not get Square off the hook for supplying an experience that is inferior to the last 100+ hours of the game, after they learned from some of their launch mistakes.

Not only that, but New Game + erases any other justification to keep this content in the required block.

Heck, if story were the driving force behind requiring so much MSQ then Coils would be required of every new player, and that's a whole new tier of asinine. That answers bigger questions than gobbie cheese or sniffing chocobos ever will.