Problem with Duty forced into Expansion Content...

[Jijifli]

I will stick with it because I got through a lot of this game by myself and without a free company. I just do not like it when mmo's force group content onto you. WoW doesn't do it and neither does EvE or most fantasy based mmo's. I just do not think it should be embedded in requirements for the main story is all.

Woah, working together in a MASSIVELY ONLINE MULTIPLAYER game.

This crap is why Steps got hard nerfed to the ground.

[Niwashi]

There's literally 100 quests between original game and expansion

I'm just curious why every thread I've seen complaining about the gating is bothered by those quests in particular. Most people seem fine with requiring the 2.0 quests and there are a lot more of them, but it's the 2.1 - 2.55 quests that people complain about.

[Jijifli]

I'm just curious why every thread I've seen complaining about the gating is bothered by those quests in particular. Most people seem fine with requiring the 2.0 quests and there are a lot more of them, but it's the 2.1 - 2.55 quests that people complain about.

Usual reason I see is because, "There's no point since it was meant for 50's and the cap is 60 now." Which when you consider that they want people to understand the story, only means that we have to do the extra quests.

Square wanted us to understand WHY we went to Ishgard and WHY we're allowed in. They don't just let people in willy nilly over there.

[Noxifer]

that's why you have multiple classes on the same character, can't join the same FC on alts and can't mail anything to each other. That's also why the sub that's alt friendly is more expensive. This game is simply not designed to have alts.

Um, yes you can join the same FC. You can't invite yourself to the FC, of course. But you can either have someone else invite you or, if you want a solo FC, temporarily open up recruitment and relog to apply for membership. Me and my flatmate have an FC for our alts, mainly to stop the FC invite spam (and to make it easier to transfer stuff between characters via FC chest, though we more often mail each other's alts with stuff).

The game is designed to allow alts; if it wasn't, there would only be the "single character per server" subscription model.

Could not agree more with the OP. It severely deters the drive to level alts.

I'm... half-and-half in agreement. Yes, it's annoying at times (like when doing the boring/repetitive stretches of the MSQ), but I also understand why they decided to do so. (Insert here any number of jokes regarding Ishgard being a gated community.)
Mostly, however, this doesn't have anything to do with the queue times for duties, since A) they give plenty of rewards for people to run the roulettes at least once per day, and all the things required for MSQ are in the roulettes. And B), if you don't want to rely on strangers, it's the perfect excuse to actually make friends with other players. You know, socialize. Play the game the way it was intended to. Before they added DF into the game. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. Me and my flatmate used to play this as a co-op, and found dungeons with strangers a chore. After we did Titan (normal), we decided "we're never doing hard mode if this was normal". Then... we made good friends, and found ourselves not only doing Titan HM but Ex as well, and loving it. I think the first thing either of us said after the first time we did HM was "...can we go again?"
No, most of my annoyance with their decision to lock 3.x entirely behind 2.x MSQ was their decision to lock the new jobs behind it as well. They could easily have placed their trainers somewhere in Coerthas or Mor Dhona and just locked them behind level 30. Lock them behind the level 30-ish MSQ if they must. Instead of this "get to 50, do all the 50 quests, then pick up the new job and start re-levelling it from 30 again".
I've accepted their decision to do so, but not happily ^^; (Besides, it's not as though they could change that now.)

Edit: (To save today's post count)

I did have an idea for this to fix that problem, since I do wish my alt could just be DRK already.

How about if you've completed the 3.0 story (That's going to the 60 story.) on one character, you can unlock the jobs at 30 for your alts. This way the player has already proved something, and they don't just get a skip to 30 since they have to level up their first job to 30 anyways.

It's a good idea. But it'd still give the same problems with the job trainers. They'd need to find some way of cross-checking achievements (or similar) and apply it to all other alts, and coming up with an alternative 'story' for how you become those jobs. The job quests are written, after all, based on their job trainers being behind the Ishgard MSQ wall. And while it might not seem like an issue now, I'd bet that if they took the cheap way out and let the story be the same, people would complain about how the job quests refer to stuff that hasn't happened yet. And if they changed it into the just "hey, you're now a [job]. grats", people would complain that it cheapened the [job] story. ^^;

[Jijifli]

No, most of my annoyance with their decision to lock 3.x entirely behind 2.x MSQ was their decision to lock the new jobs behind it as well. They could easily have placed their trainers somewhere in Coerthas or Mor Dhona and just locked them behind level 30. Lock them behind the level 30-ish MSQ if they must. Instead of this "get to 50, do all the 50 quests, then pick up the new job and start re-levelling it from 30 again".
I've accepted their decision to do so, but not happily ^^; (Besides, it's not as though they could change that now.)

I did have an idea for this to fix that problem, since I do wish my alt could just be DRK already.

How about if you've completed the 3.0 story (That's going to the 60 story.) on one character, you can unlock the jobs at 30 for your alts. This way the player has already proved something, and they don't just get a skip to 30 since they have to level up their first job to 30 anyways.

[Duuude007]

Could not agree more with the OP. It severely deters the drive to level alts.

Took me just over 4 days to go from lv 1 alt to 52 and access to ishgard. Solo, with only doing MSQ partied dungeons ONCE each via DF. And i did this on two separate alts recently during 3.1 patch, BEFORE the special XP ring that you get... Crymore.

And yes, also had time to get 2 other classes leveled for crossclass skills and unlock job, also have 2nd lieutenant on them. Super easy.