Quote Originally Posted by LittleImp View Post
This is.. not a good analogy at all.

It's often touted as a theme-park MMO, so let's stick with theme-parks instead.

It's not abnormal to go to a theme-park to ride specific attractions while ignoring others. Imagine if you went to a park that required you to ride "It's a small world" for 200 hours before you were allowed to ride any of the roller-coasters LOL.
Honestly this isn't a good analogy either. FFXIV is Final Fantasy first with a story to follow foremost. WoW as well can't be that theme park because since Shadowlands you need to do a campaign before you're let loose (and in SL you had to mandatorily do it once to unlock Threads of Fate quest/dungeon leveling on alts). So neither of these giants have this ultimate freedom theme park design.

And honestly that's fine. YMMV. If a friend I asked to play gets put off by MSQ, it's not the end of the world. They just don't like the idea. It's not a cope, but being told that "ARR sucks and is suuuuper lengthy" or "you have hundreds of hours before you until you can do anything at all (which is untrue)" harmed how I felt about the game more than actually playing it did.