Quote Originally Posted by Arkevorkhat View Post
This is the real answer here, and the reason that most of the suggestions in this thread will never be implemented.

Square-enix has a financial incentive to make story skip books as appealing as possible, and so every change to the MSQ that makes it faster or easier is a potential skip book that they've potentially shot themselves in the foot on.

I'd bet money that the reason behind the ARR changes in 5.3 was that SE's management decided that the potential lost revenue from not having as many people skip ARR would be balanced out by an increase in people moving from free trial to paid accounts. There's little reason to devote development time to trimming ARR while simultaneously expanding the trial, outside of calculated financial incentive.
The reason to trim ARR, and the reason they DID trim ARR, was to increase new player retention of people going through that. New players are probably less likely to buy skips anyway compared to people with alts who don't want to bother with it anymore.

Whether ARR 'needs' any further trimming after what they did, I don't know. I haven't gone back to replay it.

But if you get a player to buy a boost, okay that's a one time purchase. If ARR makes someone quit however, and making changes would have gotten them to stick around, you keep getting money from them longer term.