Quote Originally Posted by Avoidy View Post
Compounding this is the ARR gameplay, which -- like someone else already mentioned accurately -- is slow, repetitive, and boring. There are some people who love a slow burn, and they're going to pull up to this thread like they're in the majority, but for most people this game sucks until you sink like 200 hours into it.
I don't know about that because a lot of YouTube videos and streams I've watched of new players, doing a simple 1-2 combo and running out of red circles is difficult for them, making ARR a decent challenge for them.

Post-ARR actually damaged their trust in the writers so badly that they began skipping about 30 quests in and simply never stopped.
I don't know why people hate post-ARR when the story there is amazing. I loved the Crystal Brave stuff, the Moenbryda stuff, the Midgardsormr and Steps of Faith stuff and the uneventful meeting at Ul'dah so much. I loved getting closer with the Ishgardians in Coerthas and chasing Lady Iceheart too. The only bit that is kind of strange is the moogles and even stranger is it now being the first trial.

People will say "they've already cut down on ARR's story," but when you look at the scale of what they did and the amount still left, it's basically nothing.
That's because it would prevent them telling the story of ARR, which is a good story that they want to still be telling somewhere.

ARR dungeons are a blight, everyone who gets them in leveling roulette wants it over as quickly as possible because the kit's trash.
I don't think the kit is a problem, but rather leveling dungeons in general are a problem because, regardless of the expansion, the rotation is broken when not at 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 ie. to apply my damage buff on Warrior in some dungeons, I have to do my aoe rotation, because I don't have the Single Target version yet...

You can't even really play the MSQ with them because 90% of it is just solo fetch quests.
Apparently they had to decide whether other players would be part of the story's lore and they decided against it. This wasn't a great decision in my opinion because it means SWTOR has them beat in cooperative play.

And you know why they do it, right? To sell story skips.
They do it because they want people to experience the story, because it's a story game. They don't advertise skips in the game and they make them cost precisely because they don't want people to buy them, but they want to give them the option because there was demand for it. Yoshi-P made a post about his logic saying that in the Chinese region, it was mainly used for alts and hardly bought by new players at all here.

Quote Originally Posted by Raraka View Post
Considering that on my first attempt at playing I quit around the wine quest
That part is a bit tedious, but to my surprise they kept it, because it's telling the story of the Company of Heroes and also taking advantage of a young adventurer's naivity. I think that it being tedious didn't matter to me because I was new and having a "take it slow" part of the game gave me time to focus on learning and understanding how to play.

Particularly I think Voice acting more of ARR would improve the experience a lot
That would clash with the new actors, so the acting would have to be redone entirely for ARR. I really don't want this, personally.

That or as others have mentioned, giving a new starting point for new players.
I think they could get away with starting the story at 7.0 in two ways.
  1. Have the MSQ diverge into branching paths after leaving the first City State, where instead of doing Sastasha you go to Limsa Lominsa and sail to 7.0.
  2. Start in a new expansion area to begin with, but don't reference the history of the characters you're with unless you've actually completed the relevant MSQ quests that come before it or put interactions with scions into sidequests like Tataru's Grand Endeavor.