Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
/person plays a game part of a series well known world wide for its very long storylines

"Why does this game have so much story???? WTH????"

It's like being surprised that CoD has guns.
Absent any other consideration there is absolutely nothing wrong with a deep storyline. However this is an MMO and that self-same story is an enormous roadblock to a sizable enough demographic that Square themselves went out of their way to attempt to mitigate it. Their first attempt was characteristically conservative and treated one of the symptoms their metrics told them (too many people gave up in 7th Astral). Whether or not anybody thinks those quests were just grand is immaterial. Square was demonstrably losing potential customers. I suspect them opening up the free trial through HW was another mitigation effort.

Very few people are concerned with the amount of story, just why they have to suffer through it. Convincing people to play is hard enough, telling them they have to pay extra just to play at the level their friends are playing at? "LOL, nope" is probably a much milder version of the response you can reasonably expect. The darker side of skips is that there's no going back. Yes there's New Game+ but there's zero reward for doing it. IMO that lack of reward is why having to trudge through the patch stories is so reviled.

If XIV was some weird niche MMO, then sure, it can get away with the gating. But it's not, in fact it's one of the very few MMO's worth playing and Square's investors know this. Be prepared for further measures.