MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[Barwara]

I quit this game twice trying to get through the MSQ, I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'm stubborn and came back, but how many people do? One of the big problems with the MSQ, especially early on, is how much running you do. There is a severe disrespect for the players time. There are so many quests, that are literally 'run for 10 minutes, get one line of dialogue, run back for 10 minutes'. To me, this happens to the point of being insulting. It gets particularly bad early on when you still don't even have enough money to teleport back, which just happened to me last night. I started a new character, on a new server, just to get a feel for what they did to the MSQ, as it's always been my warning to people that ask me if they should try FF. Same old stuff.

To argue that even half of those quests are indispensable to the story is pretty laughable. ALL of those quests, especially early on, should auto complete instead of making you go back to the original quest hub. Any MSQ that has you running back to the original NPC, only to then run back out to the area you were just in, should just issue you the next quest in the series when you complete the previous one. That alone would cut the time it takes in half.

It's fairly obvious, that the MSQ was designed, at the time, to pad the game. That padding is certainly no longer needed, it's a real barrier for new players trying to get into the game. The biggest problem for retention for new players in this game, is how rudimentary the combat is early on, combined with how much time you spend literally doing nothing but running. This game still makes a horrible first impression.

As a new-ish player, I can attest to that. The fetch-like nature of most quests in ARR and post ARR is ridiculous. I completely understand your frustration, and I find it to be the one of the weakest points in FFXIV. I personally even stopped doing sidequests within a few weeks of playing, unless they lead to unlockable content quests. It's really a waste of my time... I'm not going to deny that even though I got through ARR and feel like I enjoyed it, what happened in there feels like a blur, because there was a lot of mind-numbing tasks you had to do. Nevertheless! I got through that. I guess other aspects of the game as well as the swiftness in levelling kept me hooked and everything gets better in HW. (As someone who never played an MMO with this type of combat system, the combat/class systems are what really intrigued me and got me hooked. So I wouldn't say it's terrible.)

As someone said earlier, the MSQ still offers all of the world-building you need to truly enjoy the expansions, so I'd argue here that 'improving the quality of the quests' would be better than just 'condensing' the MSQ. Yet, do we want the devs to spend time on that, instead of spending time creating new content/improving new content on past errors? :/ How realistic is it to ask them to spend more time revisioning the oldest part of the game?