Less "mandatory alone time", please (you're already on your way!)

[RichardButte]

From the latest letter from the producer:

Main Scenario Progression to Access 4.0 Content

Though it’s still a bit early to talk about this, you’ll be able to access and accept quests for Patch 4.0 even if you have not completed the main scenario for the Patch 3.x series. Similarly, you’ll be able to unlock new jobs regardless of your scenario progression. Due to this, we feel the need to create a system that will allow you to watch a digest of what happened. However, for the 3.0 story, since everyone has seen everything up until now I think it was enjoyable, and while there were some pros and cons for this, I think having the system we did for the 3.x series was a good thing.

Please, continue on this path.

I made a post about this a while back about how nearly all of my friends I've convinced to try this game have quit, and all for the same reason: we play MMOs to play together, and while I understand that the game has a story to tell, the story forces each new player to endure far too much "mandatory alone time". In that same thread, numerous other players posted similar stories of losing friends to the story grind and mandatory alone time, especially during the grind from level 50 through all of the MSQ through to 2.5.

The quality of the story is completely irrelevant to the issue: the story could be better than Game of Thrones and everything Shakespeare ever wrote combined and it still doesn't matter when players just want to play an MMO WITH their friends.

And yes, I realize that the story quest is a good way to level, but that doesn't matter when there's literally nothing I can do to help my friends get through the story quest except for helping them run dungeons.

If I want to help my friends powerlevel via dungeons, fates or leves, why can't we just do that? The "cost of entry" to new content in most MMOs is reaching the necessary level, and that's it. While most MMOs have done away with "attunement processes", FFXIV's storyline is one gigantic attunement.

Instead, why not just have dungeons and raids become accessible as soon as we reach that level?

For those who want to be content-restricted by the story quest, give us a checkbox in the options to enable or disable content restriction: with the box checked, dungeons won't appear in the duty finder until you've completed the attunement quests. If unchecked, dungeons will appear as soon as the player hits the appropriate level (but would still have to meet the gearscore requirements, obviously).

FFXIV is an MMO first and a FF game second. I realize story is important to some, but not everyone is going to want to play this game for the story. The endgame is fantastic and the raid encounters are fun and challenging. There's a lot of content that people can and will enjoy with their friends, but there's an awful lot of mandatory alone time to endure before they can really do that.

Please, give us an option to just powerlevel our friends to get them up to endgame. Gating fun raid content behind hours and hours of cutscene drudgery has only served to drive my friends away from the game (and looking back, the 1-50 storyline felt more like a thread to connect a bunch of boss battles together than a genuine storyline, though I thought 51-60 was a lot more interesting).

Give us a digest to watch the events of 1-50 if we so choose, but forcing players to endure hours of mashing esc to skip cutscenes only serves to drive away subs who would've otherwise spent months and months staying subbed while playing the endgame.