Quote Originally Posted by Kirutsuki View Post
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.
This is the thing that always makes me reluctant to let new players just skip the entire MSQ and go straight into endgame already auto-leveled and geared at 100 like so many other people insist new players should be able to do (alts are a different story, everyone should be able auto-skip whatever parts they want on alts for free). How exactly do they expect to retain a player who is confused as hell about how anything works and has zero context or attachment to anything in the world? That kind of player isn't likely to turn into a subscriber who stays on for years and years, instead they'll have "seen everything" in their free month and then leave right after until the next expansion (which of course people will again insist their friend be able to auto-skip it all and join them at endgame once more).

It's enough to make me wonder that when people say they tried to bring a friend into the game that "got bored and quit in ARR" that maybe their friend just isn't suited for playing MMOs, least of all a heavily story-driven one, and that there's better options out there for "pick up and play" co-op games they could be playing together instead. Alternately, they're not really trying to bring "friends" into the game so much as warm bodies for whatever piece of content they're trying to do, but that becomes hard to do when said warm bodies have to go through the process of unlocking said content instead of having instant-access to it upon logging in for the first time.

While there's certainly an argument to be made for letting certain pieces of side content be unlocked sooner so people can find that one thing they like or have alternate paths to leveling, it shouldn't come at the expense of reducing the rest of the game to little more than background noise, because at that point why even bother to include chaff content like the MSQ if everyone is just going to rush to skip it so they can hurry and get to endgame where everyone else is?