New player experience ( Changes needed asap, Feedback )

[Maddyuff]

Since you posted this in the FC Discord, I’ll give you my honest opinion.
I know the game has its flaws, but if someone is getting this frustrated while being helped by a “veteran player” with over 7,000 hours in the game, it feels like something isn’t adding up.
From playing with you and interacting with you in-game, this honestly feels more like a you-problem than a game-problem. You’re describing issues your friend is having that I’ve either never encountered or that usually have very simple solutions.
Maybe the problem is how things are being explained, or maybe they’re being explained the wrong way — or, to be blunt, maybe your friend just has a serious skill issue.
That said, please keep in mind that there are plenty of people in the FC who are always willing to help and might have different approaches or ideas for solving these problems.

[Remolia]

The main point of MSQ, is selling Story Skips for extra $$$.

You either a veteran player, who completed MSQ is normal phase, and have no stress. Or u are a new player, who have to be happy with outdated powercreeped content with 0 difficulty in first 1000 hours. Where if u are fine with it - keep playing. If u are not, and dreaming for high level content - you just buy skip or drop the game.

I invited like 5 players in this game, they all dropped the game during HW/SB/SHB/EW, coz game did not show anything interesting in their first hours.

[TheRealDesastr]

Anyone I've tried to introduce to the game got bored and left. That was nearly my fate too, but I bought a skip for ARR and came back to do it on another character later.

I'd say the tail end of MSQ was important to set up Garlemald. Most other things, no. Some key moments like the sylph death thing were also notable. Dipping into Coerthas was also interesting storywise. There is a lot of good story value sprinkled in, but it's far and between, which is the problem.

XIV players will swear up and down that ARR is the most important thing ever, that new players are at fault for hating it, yada yada.

Cool.

That's not how to keep people interested or playing the game. I think some major changes need to happen, I think the reliance on making money on story skips and storylocking every character INCLUDING ALTS is absolutely ridiculous.

Alas, if they want to keep bleeding players and not getting any new ones, that's on them and the community for defending it. I am so tired of seeing 'ARR is so perfect and great and who cares if new players hate it' from the community because the game is never going to grow if most new players get bored and never try again or advance because the ARR experience is so bloody abysmal.

[hydralus]

Selecting a quest should give a "breadcrumb" line that the player can follow to the quest location, reducing the need to constantly open the map just because you ran too far. This should also direct the player to Ferry Skippers so players don't just start running the long way.

This is like 1 step away from the whole mobile auto-complete dealie. Which I suppose is the endgame to overworld being useless.

[Ath192]

Since you posted this in the FC Discord, I’ll give you my honest opinion.
I know the game has its flaws, but if someone is getting this frustrated while being helped by a “veteran player” with over 7,000 hours in the game, it feels like something isn’t adding up.
From playing with you and interacting with you in-game, this honestly feels more like a you-problem than a game-problem. You’re describing issues your friend is having that I’ve either never encountered or that usually have very simple solutions.
Maybe the problem is how things are being explained, or maybe they’re being explained the wrong way — or, to be blunt, maybe your friend just has a serious skill issue.
That said, please keep in mind that there are plenty of people in the FC who are always willing to help and might have different approaches or ideas for solving these problems.

It's very much a game problem. And Yoshida knows it, thus he is considering a new entry point into the game.

+1 on the color wheels instead of the awful grids we have.

As a side note, every friend I've gotten to try this game but isn't a die hard fan of FF series has gotten bored and quit during ARR.

[Kirutsuki]

Since you posted this in the FC Discord, I’ll give you my honest opinion.
I know the game has its flaws, but if someone is getting this frustrated while being helped by a “veteran player” with over 7,000 hours in the game, it feels like something isn’t adding up.

We've had our differences for the longest time and I don't really understand the why of it. These issues can't really be a "me problem" when all we are doing is playing the game as normal and my friend has noticed these things all by themselves.
I'm here just to list them. There's almost nothing I can do if they say they can't find something on the map except to ask them try learn it, I can guide them how to learn it, but there are times when handholding like that isn't how they want it either.
All of it takes time and when you pile other small things on top of it, it gets more and more frustrating.

As for skill issue, 100% my friend has never played a game like this before, so there is bound to be a certain level of a learning process. They also play other games like Monster Hunter and Warframe,
knows to ask correct questions, which I have been actually surprised about, because when I started I never would have known to ask such questions. Like about what certain icons mean like debuffs, is a skill they learned something they have to keep uptime on like lucid dreaming or how Presense of Mind works.
Those are the simple ones, then there are questions like what does the circling arrow icon mean when you right click an already selected target so I had to explain that it means your character does auto-attacks if you're close enough.

They also asked for a job that was a support and would be least rotation oriented so I gave them White Mage, with Summoner being a contender, but is a DPS.

I also have personal experience from bringing new people into videogames because I've been a coach during the launch day of MHWorld, It was quite literally my job for a time. So I have a lot of experience of what kind of problems brand new players encounter during a normal play session, from simple movement to figuring out what to press or how to find something. Sometimes people pick up on problems quick and adapt, other times it takes longer. And it takes patience, XIV just has ALOT of small things that keep piling up, they might not be what you agree with, but you also have alot of hours in the game and can easily brush off a simple issue into the "it's an older game pile".

[Kirutsuki]

The main point of MSQ, is selling Story Skips for extra $$$.

You either a veteran player, who completed MSQ is normal phase, and have no stress. Or u are a new player, who have to be happy with outdated powercreeped content with 0 difficulty in first 1000 hours. Where if u are fine with it - keep playing. If u are not, and dreaming for high level content - you just buy skip or drop the game.

I invited like 5 players in this game, they all dropped the game during HW/SB/SHB/EW, coz game did not show anything interesting in their first hours.

It's hard to say if my friend would enjoy skipping into the end game. On one hand they are exited on the prospect because of all the glamour and mounts & minions, but on the other hand they would be even more confused trying to learn ~36 buttons all in one go.
and they've even said that they don't want to do that cause it would mean they don't understand anything about the story or characters there-in.
There's times when the story picks up and there's interesting stuff happening, like the Sylph questline and anything going on about the Masked individuals, but there's also so much extra stuff surrounding it, so I try my best to keep it interesting gameplaywise.
Going to the gold saucer which they enjoy, doing dungeons which they enjoy or doing hunt-logs and unlocking new features. So I would not really say the situation really applies here.

[Kirutsuki]

This is like 1 step away from the whole mobile auto-complete dealie. Which I suppose is the endgame to overworld being useless.

It is. But I am all for having the option for players who need it than not have it at all.
It's either that or a whole overhaul on how the map functions. And I don't personally even know how you would approach fixing the map to make it more readable for new players.

[Gwenkatsu]

But, for example in the Sylph questline there's a moment when one of the Sylphs runs away from the camp you go and talk to them and they run away from you.
So now you have to report back to the Sylph quest giver only for them to say we should chase after the one who ran away from us. Like, bruh... This isn't a single instance either of something like this and it just adds unnecessary amount of running back and forth and nothing being said that isn't already known.

I'm currently leveling another new char, and this here was one of the first things that came to my mind when I read your post
Sylph: "Find my friend."
WoL runs into the woods, finds the friend, friend runs away. WoL heads back to camp.
WoL: "I found your friend, but they ran away."
Sylph: "For the god's sake, just *follow* them, stupid. Sheesh, heroes these days..."

I still remember that quest at Druscaron's were you had to pour water over fighting drunkards, by following these steps:

• Go to the river
• Click on the water
• Click the bucket in your inventory.
• Now the bucket is in the water. Click on it, then wait for the bucket to fill with water.
• Click on the full bucket to gather it up again.
• Go to the drunkards, click them, then click the bucket in you inventory.

Congratulations, you managed the epic feat to pour water over drunkards!
When I first ran into this quest I was like "seriously WTF?". The only thing missing was an additional action button "breath" that you had to press every 10 seconds to not die from suffocation...
This got shortened later on, but my personal opinion is that they could throw away 30% of the ARR MSQ quest steps (and 80% of DT MSQ) without losing anything of value.

[Kirutsuki]

Anyone I've tried to introduce to the game got bored and left. That was nearly my fate too, but I bought a skip for ARR and came back to do it on another character later.

I'd say the tail end of MSQ was important to set up Garlemald. Most other things, no. Some key moments like the sylph death thing were also notable. Dipping into Coerthas was also interesting storywise. Most new players get bored and never try again or advance because the ARR experience is so bloody abysmal.

I also tried the game 4 times, 3 times I got to level 20-30, 4th time I got to ~46 in the MSQ. Fifth time is finally when it clicked when I got into Heavensward and beyond.
We also visited Coerthas outside of story for our hunting log and it instantly became one of their favorite areas, not just the locale but the enemies as well were unique and more dragonlike.

All my friend knows is that having atleast somewhat of an understanding of whats going on is a good idea and usually when we notice the story isn't going anywhere important we start to kind of push past it and I just give the TLDR so we can get to the more important bits.
Like recently we did the Ala Mhigan MSQ portion, but the idea of that whole section is to introduce the player to this group of people who's homeland was robbed and they now reside in Little Ala Mhigo as refugees, that's all they needed to know
and everything else about what's actually going on about people missing or whatever was for the most part unimportant right up until the moment they mentioned they were trying to summon Rhalgr as a primal with the help of a masked man.

So it's alot of snooze-fest type moments with small bits of "ok thats interesting". And then we go take a break in the Gold Saucer or go play some Triple Triad cause apparently that's actually fun

There is alot they could do. I think adding a sort of a "ARR Journey book" could help to keep ARR as a thing you can watch if you want to skip straight to Heavensward could be helpful. I don't think it applies to our situation though where if we would skip to the endgame that the experience would be any better.
If anything it would be more confusing with how many buttons alone the jobs get at that stage.