A thought on solving the content gating issue. Long read, pls bare with me.

[OccamX]

Here's my issue. Remember how many people hated FF13 because you were basically stuck in a tunnel-shaped game experience for 20 hours?

FF14 is soo much worse right now. At least FF13 had gameplay along the way and an interesting story.

If you have been playing FF14 ever since 2.0 came out, you do NOT understand how much story there is, and how little gameplay, before the game opens up. The game is 90% dialog boxes for the first 50 hours, before reaching the actual MMO part of the game. The story is mildly interesting, but the way MMOs work is that the relevant MMO content is always at the end of the road. And the older the game gets, the longer that road gets.

How long until new players have to click through 80 hours of dialog boxes to reach the actual game? 100 hours? 200 hours? S-E needs a better long-term plan if they want to continue to attract new players.