The new player experience and how FFXIV fails as an MMO.

[Gyson]

Story skip is really a shitty solution to bring up, "Yeah buy the game for $60 or whatever than spend $15 on a sub then spend another $40 on a story skip and we can play together! Or grind out 500 hours of story!"

I understand your point, but at the same time that's a bit of an exaggeration. The game can be purchased for $40, a sub is $13, and the story skip is $25. So that $115 price tag you're suggesting is actually $78. And it's not just a multi-expansion story skip - it levels a character's class to 90, provides them with a full set of level 90 gear, a half a million in gil, and saves them however many months of subscription cost it would normally take to progress through A Realm Reborn and four additional expansions. If it even saves you just two months of subscription time then it's paid for itself. That is not that horrible of an ask, especially compared to what $25 normally gets you in most modern online game's cash shops.

I'm not wild about the term "grind" in the context you're using it in, because "grinding out 500 hours of story" is.. you know, playing a Final Fantasy themed game. But if people want to skip the main draw of a Final Fantasy game then at least an option exists.

I don't know, if I wanted a specific friend/sibling to play this game with me, but they didn't want to have to play through 500 (or however many) hours of content alone just to catch up, I'd just offer to play through the game with them (the New Game Plus option provides long-time players with the means to do this alongside new players). As I mentioned earlier, I went through this entire game with friends - we voice the unspoken dialogues to each other and all that other embarrassing nonsense to make everything more entertaining and a shared experience. Your newly introduced friends don't have to play through multiple expansions alone without you, and you get the benefit of a front-row seat to all their reactions as the story unfolds.