Quote Originally Posted by Nadda View Post
No. Disagree.

MSQ length isn't a problem.

Expansions are supposed to expand a game.
If you're endgame oriented that's one thing but I know of other MMOs where everything in the past becomes irrelevant. I don't want that for FF14.

People think of these like dream scenarios where you're perfectly in sync with playing with others in MMOs.

People have mismatched schedules

Someone is always ahead or behind

And eventually, everyone ends up soloing stuff anyway the quests are designed to be solo'd

Are you thinking of like - Everquest or FF11 where singular mobs could beat the shit out of you so you were forced to group up? It's not that I think that's bad it's just not really the design of modern MMOs.
Even if you duo level in something like Classic WoW you're mostly doing solo tasks but next to someone else and that gets pretty dull quickly.

Most MMOs are the multiplayer content is the Dungeon, is the boss fight, that's what you do.

So if not for anything, that's more of an indictment on modern MMO design which older MMO's have their own flaw of it then relying too much on playing with other people in order to get things done in the open world.
There's not really a happy medium where you're both able to be self sufficient and also play with players in meaningful interactable ways... that's why devs spend so much time making catered content for battle content for people to do together the rest of it is all social hangout sort of affair.
Thinking the MSQ length is fine is delusional. MANY people quit (and I know several personally) because they want to get to a lot of the content that comes later in the game but its gated behind 400 hours of msq. Play the game full time for 10 weeks (and increasing) before you can get to the content you want to try doesn't fly with many people.

Is the story good? It's ok. The storytelling is awful but the story is quite good and many people enjoy it.
Should we force everyone to do the entire story before being able to play current content? Absolutely not.

I don't think they should necessarily shorten the MSQ, but a more WoW approach where you can work on the newest expansion early would make a lot of people happy and willing to play the game.