Hot Take: The MSQ grind is too long and its harmful to expanding friend groups.

[Avoidy]

By selling story skips in the cash shop, the devs are admitting that the story is worth skipping. If the developers truly believed that the story was a valuable experience that everyone should witness once, they wouldn't sell skips that a first timer could purchase. It's the same design philosophy as those free to play mmos we pretend to be better than; they'll have some gatekeepy grindy gameplay and then tacitly imply that you can skip it for a few dollars. If they thought there was value to doing it -- real, genuine value -- then they wouldn't let you abandon it.

Imagine if you created something amazing and wanted to share it with people. Like, imagine you had an art portfolio full of your best stuff, and you sat down to show it to somebody who'd paid money to see it. When someone sat down to finally take a look at it, would you tell them they could skip to the very last page for 10 bucks? Of course not, right? Because you think that your collection of work is worth sharing. Taken from this perspective, it's honestly weird that a "story focused" "FF first, MMO second" game like XIV even has story skips to begin with. Especially for people who have not experienced the story at least once already.

On the main topic, I agree somewhat. All of the new people I've recruited into this game have quit during the post-ARR slog. The "filter," if you will. Trying to get new people into this game and having them see how bad it is at the start is so embarrassing that I don't even try anymore.