Quote Originally Posted by R041 View Post
What you're typically going to find on these forums are players that have played through the expansions over a long period of time
This is true.

and don't understand that the barrier to entry is a 400 hour minimum visual novel.
This is false. We do understand that it is a 400 hour minimum visual novel. This is a problem we all acknowledge, but it's not easy to solve because the expansion stories are intertwined and you can't just split them up suddenly.

Until that problem is solved somehow, all we can tell new players is that it's a story-driven game and that if they don't like that then the game might not be for them.

They forget that actual casual play is 1-2 hours a day if you have any form of life, which means anyone trying to get to the MMO side through the MSQ with this amount of time can't play with their friends for nearly a year
This is true but again there isn't anything we can do about it, so we just tell the truth which is that it is a story game with a long story and if that isn't their thing, then either the game isn't for them or they could consider a skip at risk of not understanding the context of all the content and why other people are so excited for it.

There is the endgame content of each prior expansion which you can stop and try out, but obviously you can't do the latest endgame content that just released until you get through all of it.

A lot of people skip dialog, and the rule of thumb is to skip until there's voice acting.
The problem is that this rushing can cause you not to really connect with the characters much, because this is where they mention you by name and flesh out the personal connection some more and without that connection to the characters and the story you can just get disconnected from it and quit.