How to fix the sidequests...

[Betelgeuzah]

Betelgeuzah: Your point is moot.

Quests that don't give exp/sp are pointless, you can simply do Leves to get the money to buy the gear they offer AND get SP/EXP. So can new players. Yet another bad decision by SE.

MMO Economy 101:

Simply getting money from Leves doesn't mean you can buy the equipment. It depends on the supply and demand. If there is a lot of demand for equipment, the price will go up. At that point, people can't afford the equipment anymore simply just with the money gained from the Leves. On top of the leveling process being as fast as it is, people simply won't bother.

I'd say that your point is moot here. New players will find quests that reward equipment worthwhile. Those with 10 million gil and rank 50 classes... not so much. The quests are designed for those people however.

But to simply say a person must choose between character advancement and flavor text?

The person must choose between getting equipment and getting money + exp. And in most cases that's not even true, as you can do 8 leves per 36 hours. You can easily do both.

XI does the same thing XIV is doing, and it turned off the EXP. You were either EXPing, or you were farming money, doing BCNM's and so on. You weren't going to get any EXP if it wasn't a rare exception. It was one or the other.

What? I'm not talking about what you can buy. My point was that a person starting on day one will come across an available quest "let's say a rank 5 quest for a rank 5 item." Now in the time it takes for that person to complete that quest, they could have completed 2 or 3 guildleves made it to rank 6 and with the gil acquired bought said item from the market wards.

Then he runs out of leves. Not to mention due to high demand 2-3 leves isn't enough at all. Have you seen how much gil you gain from a rank 1 leve? Not enough to buy anything. You can easily do both.

Yes, RPGs do have certain quests that do not actually give you anything, except they have an impact on your character

Equipment. Titles are coming.

Granted, like I said flavor text is not enough if they're not going to give XP or money. The quests need to be of better quality. Both in the story department and the content department.

At the same time, FFXIV is a year behind where it should be (assuming that Yoshi-P's plan is completed on the 1 year anniversary of the original CE launch. You could have one quest if you could convince everyone to play it over and over again.

Nobody cares if the 30k or so people playing currently need to play the same quest over and over again. SE should be building the content for the people they want to play, not the people currently playing. To people not playing it's the same whether the game is a year late or not. What matters is what's in the game when they start playing. For most people, that point only comes when SE starts advertising the game again and releases the PS3 version. That's where they should aim for, not the current playerbase.