Quote Originally Posted by R041 View Post
The people that do acknowledge the story being a large gatekeeper still may not have the empathy for the amount of actual effort it takes and how lonely the experience is.

Something that finally upset me was that my gf broke down and said she can never have fun with our FC, or play with us because she's been stuck in MSQ for roughly 2 years now. She's in Shadowbringers but the game has barely taught her how to even play, it's just conditioned her read a visual novel. This is not a good experience.

Yoshi messed up in trying to pull the over-arching story to the end of each MSQ and dragging it on, making this whole thing a massive mess and 2 whole expansions being almost completely filler. Other MMOs have done a decent job of branching their new areas into their own story without requiring everyone know everything about the previous.

I can't sit idly by telling people to just play a subscription MMO for 400 hours by themselves, it's completely unreasonable and it's asking people to sub for roughly 6 months just to stick with the story. And I'm sorry, but getting to know Alphinaud over 400 hours is not worth not getting to play with your actual friends.

We're going to start to lose players to WoW with the changes they've made.




This is the lack of empathy for the new player and coop experience. I don't really care about my own experience, I've played this game to death. I want other players to experience it and do MMO/Open World things, but that's a hard and nearly impossible task. For the new players that are only leveling 1 class, they have 0 reason to do anything else other than crafting/gathering in their spare time. Which only delays the inevitable and expands that MSQ time.
Okay, I sympathise with a few things, like having to go through ARR and maybe not liking to read much (I happen to do, so... eh), but explain to me why you can't just do the 'old' trial fights or what have you. Maybe I over read that part. You make it sound like there is nothing else to do till you reach current endgame.