Quote Originally Posted by Curisu View Post
You could simply buy a story skip and then play the story with NG+ .

But also, I don't understand why you don't want to play dungeons.
<<snip>>
The big majority of player's are completely understanding towards new player and the mistakes they make.
I have no idea how New Game + works, so I can't comment on that.

It's not that I don't want to do dungeons, or that I can't. I research before going and have done well enough that I've averaged 2 or better commendations per thus far. And yes, I know people are (generally) pleasant about honest mistakes and helping newbie along. I simply have severe anxiety playing with people I don't know. I'd prefer to wait and do dungeon content for some point in the future when I've recruited or otherwise worked my way into a group I'm comfortable doing group content with. But I don't want to not be able to do the rest of the main story till then.

I like to play through the story - I just don't want to deal with group-gated solo content. The store currently has the option to skip all 200+ MSQ for ARR for $11. On a simple google search, it looks like there are nine-ish non-optional dungeon runs among those. I *want* to be able to play all those other 200+ minus the nine-ish.

All the functionality for an item like I described already exists, it would just need to be coded into a game item. Unless there's something significantly wrong with the hired talents or way the game code works, scripting an inquiry on quest log, opening a dialog box with active main story quest(s) listed, and flagging quest completed into an item shouldn't even take a day for one person to do. Sure, there may be meetings where new items are discussed, the coding, testing, implementation that may involve multiple people - but the total man-hours needed to put through something like this shouldn't pass 40 even being generous. Let's also be generous and say that the involved individuals make an average of $25/hr. That's $1000 to put this through. Having this option is something that would have such a significant impact on my personal enjoyment of the game that I welcome SquareEnix to contact me directly to arrange a contract in which I'll personally pay $1000 USD to the company to cover the employee wages to do this. Yes, my random group anxiety is significant enough I'd happily pay $1000 just to unlock the *option* to purchase the ability to skip that scenario.

Yes, I get that just knocking out the dungeons isn't a big deal for most of the player base. But that's not the entire player base. It doesn't take much web searching to find people asking about the minimum number of dungeons they have to do because they don't like dungeons. Or if there is a way to skip them. Or to solo them. Etc. (Even posts in these forums on the topic.)