Quote Originally Posted by Tiramu View Post
The BIB is the most important part of your post. FFXIV and WoW are completely different games with a difference focus. XIV is a story dense game, it's sold as such and what it's best known for. Unlike WoW, endgame raiding is just another thing you can do, and not *the* thing you do.

As I pointed out in my edit, the time required to get to max level has little to do with levelling pace and everything to do with progressing through the story content. You can hit level cap before you've hit Heavensward on a preferential server without breaking a sweat and there is no way they're going to do a story squish. Maybe streamline stuff that's a bit bloaty but not a squish.

This is as much in response to Amenara as you. If a new player is going to be put off by the amount of content they need to progress through (whether thats to reach endgame or to finish the story) then its much more likely the 6+ expansions we'll have by the time we get to a post Lv100 cap than the level cap itself. If they do take a punt at the game, its the story and not the levelling that's going to have them either bailing out or buying a skip.
To you, an experienced max level player adding 10 levels to your current level isn't a big deal, nor is doing another 30 hours of story to complete the expansion's x.0 MSQ. To someone from the outside looking in, they see 120 levels of content they have to get through to on top of the already daunting story and it is just bad optics to people who might want to try the game out for the first time. That is more or less the point I was trying to make with the WoW level comparison to the FFXIV level comparison. The idea behind the WoW squish is that it takes way too long for new players to get through the leveling process and needed to be cut down to make it less daunting. We are already headed down that path in FFXIV with the required MSQ taking hundreds of hours to complete.

Quote Originally Posted by Deveryn View Post
There won't be a story squish, but there might be a skip. 7.0 begins a brand new saga, so it's possible that new people will be able to jump in at that point, if they choose (for free).
That combined with a level squish at some point I think will be in the future.