Possible level/story jumps....really?

[Judah_Brandt]

As much as I enjoy operating in and helping out in the Novice Network, imagine having a fresh level 60 player plopped in front of you and having to explain the positional, cooldowns management, proper rotation, and Gierskogul use of a Dragoon. Not to mention the Cross Class skills they'll want to use. Oh and management of their buffs while keeping track of fight mechanics from all the content they'll be diving into, which of course would be easy because oh wait no they don't know what the Hell aoe indicators or tethers or debuffs or cleaves are. So in order to accommodate for THAT are you saying they'd have to dumb content down even further? That's where it affects the current player base, that's where it alienates interest. The game is all ready easy. Now make it even easier. How fast did you put away your wallet?

[RiceisNice]

That's your opinion that it teaches very little and I respect it but I disagree.

As I leveled jobs I learned more and more about the abilities and what is good to use in general situations. As I progressed through HW and learned new abilities on the way I had time to practice their utility in leveling dungeons like Aery/Vault/Gubal etc. .

You learn what you take from it. I've played with people that have multiple 60s and still can't grasp their basic job mechanics (SMNs not building aethertrail, DRGs not upkeeping BotD). For others who read their skills as soon as they get it, can generally grasp it as soon as they learn it by piecing it together (such as DRGs getting each ability post-50, likewise with BLM). The game in general is so undertuned that poeple who don't know their basic job mechanics are the dime-by-a-dozen, and I hardly feel that getting a free boost to 50 would exasperate the issue.

As much as I enjoy operating in and helping out in the Novice Network, imagine having a fresh level 60 player plopped in front of you and having to explain the positional, cooldowns management, proper rotation, and Gierskogul use of a Dragoon. Not to mention the Cross Class skills they'll want to use. Oh and management of their buffs while keeping track of fight mechanics from all the content they'll be diving into, which of course would be easy because oh wait no they don't know what the Hell aoe indicators or tethers or debuffs or cleaves are. So in order to accommodate for THAT are you saying they'd have to dumb content down even further? That's where it affects the current player base, that's where it alienates interest. The game is all ready easy. Now make it even easier. How fast did you put away your wallet?

This is hardly different from someone in EX that still doesn't grasp positional or buffs. The matter of fact is, all of this can be alleviated with a tutorial of sorts. The way WoW goes about it is that it throws you into a introduction zone where it introduces abilties specific to your class 1-by-1 and straight up tells you how to use it. By that time if you can't grasp the fundamentals of that, I doubt the leveling process of 50-60 or 60-70 would be of any help. We're not talking about a straight boost to the current cap either, rather than a boost to the previous expansion's cap (boost to 60 to jump into 4.0 content).

Content being easy in general is less about the amount of "new" players at level cap, but more on the developers catering to the lowest denominator. People consider Nidhogg normal to be hard when they're dying to telegraphed aoes that uses graphics from existing fights.. People wipe on Ozma for lacking the basic understanding of not dropping meteors ontop of your party or next to each other, multiple times. The game lacks dungeons that give you a wake up call to actually give a shite about mechanics and hold people accountable to their role (especially the dps) and none of that has anything to do about level-boosting to cap when we don't even have that in the first place.

[Judah_Brandt]

The idea to introduce a cash item that exacerbates the problem of unskilled players by using the excuse that there are all ready unskilled players is a poor argument. "There's all ready a fire, screw it let's add more fire." If something is a problem, you don't justify adding to the problem because the problem all ready exists. It's a terrible, terrible argument. If they do it, it'd be to make money. Let's not kid ourselves. And at the same time, the majority of the things that have kept it's current player base healthy is the way the game is structured. It may not be for everyone, but selling out the core of the gameplay to make $15 seems counter-productive. The game being engaging through all of the regular content and providing further challenges to unlock are what sustain a healthy subscriber count. If you sell a third of your content, 4.0, and literally negate the relevance and incentive to complete the other 2/3rds what amount of retention can you truly expect out of it? If a player doesn't care for the story, they will not do it. We all ready have content moldering in the form of old raids and dungeons. You see, they'd effectively be eliminating the use of the majority of their product just to make some quick money and hope some people hang on for whatever the new patch cycle would be. I'm guessing they'd lose in the end if this became a thing.

[RiceisNice]

The idea to introduce a cash item that exacerbates the problem of unskilled players by using the excuse that there are all ready unskilled players is a poor argument. "There's all ready a fire, screw it let's add more fire." If something is a problem, you don't justify adding to the problem because the problem all ready exists. It's a terrible, terrible argument. If they do it, it'd be to make money. Let's not kid ourselves. And at the same time, the majority of the things that have kept it's current player base healthy is the way the game is structured. It may not be for everyone, but selling out the core of the gameplay to make $15 is absolutely stupid.

I'm not advocating for a level boost; I personally think it's far far too soon to even think about it in FFXIV. Everything you've said holds true for the current state of the game. It's just that it becomes less of a "core of the gameplay" when we're looking at say, the 3rd expansion with a level 80 cap.

The major gate that I feel really needs to be address is the MSQ in general, and the trimming of all the fluff quests inbetween the relevant ones, but I'm pointing out that the whole "low player skill thing" is hardly an issue as a result of level boosting, nor can it be an issue if it's properly done. Everyone likes to shit on WoW for doing a level boost in the first place but fail to realize what it's actually meant to do and how it works. There's so many other short fallings in that game that it's hardly relevant to the aforementioned level boost unless you make a big deal of it in the first place.

[Kling-Klang]

NO to level jumping! JUST NOOOO!

[rjspencer4]

here is an idea, bring back the original Steps of Faith and have the jump end right there XD

[Snugglebutt]

I really hope they do not add such a feature for multiple reasons from potentially adding P2W in a game that SE said they never wanted P2W to be a part of, will be detrimental to the social aspect of this game where by most people make friends along the way during that leveling process while the new ones who use such a feature are unlikely to do so plus it will make the problem of people not knowing how to play currently a million times worse, if think the complaining about bad players is bad now...after such a feature the current complaints on that issue will be just a drop in the ocean compared to after.

If they do introduce it then it should be unusable past level 30 due to the amount of skills being dumped on people and additional mechanics which start being introduced around that level beyond the most basic of tank and spank which is what pre-30 is generally like. SE please do not add such a feature to this game, listen to the overwhelmingly huge proportion of negative comments about this issue here compared to the few people in favor. This is not something a large amount of your players here are saying they want in this game.

It will damage the game just to please a few people who are too lazy to put in the effort to level up like everyone else has had to do, everyone else who learned how to play through that leveling process and made new friends along the way through those growing pains, trials and tribulations. Sure there may be some players who still can't play well or adequately at 60 even after leveling up as normal but it would be a million times worse if added such a P2W style level skip potion. Instead of adding such a horrible thing like a level skip potion, just trim the quests in such a way that people still need to do them but doing them takes less time...for example if a quest asked you to fetch 20 of something, lower it to 5 of the item or move the NPC's closer together for that quest etc.

[Jadub2k]

No, Just NO!.. For the love of twelve no level skip. This is looking like launch when people Fate grinded to 50 and still didn't know how to play there jobs or dodge or whatever all over again lol That's not going to be akward taking your payed max lv character through Hall of Novice at all, of course not >.> I understand why people want something like this (and honestly feel something like this should ONLY be availible to Alt characters), but I also understand why SE did what they did. It sucks that SE barred the jobs behind content but at the same time, (even though we personally know they exsist) your character doesn't even know or has ever heard of DRK/AST/MCH because they haven't gotten to that point in the story yet. Not everyone plays for the story, Sure.. But I also know that were playing "Final Fantasy" were story has been (and always will be) the fore front of the series. Especially if its part of the main numbered series.

[Kosmos992k]

Level story jumps? potions purchasable to do this? No way. I've seen these lazy player DLC items ruin other games in the past, pretty soon you have legions of newbies who know nothing bugging the living hell out of veteran players.

The game is story driven, allowing this would increase the number of players who are disconnected from the story. It's also a very direct form of pay to win in a game that is story driven. Skipping story sections or leveling is sanctioned cheating.

Hell, why not just put a great big button on the screen that says 'EASY' and automatically awards the quest to you so you can move on?

This is a terrible idea and will diminish the game considerably. I know that they want to bring more players in and as time passes the amount of story that players have to run through to catch up increases, clearly that could be an issue. As someone else suggested collapse the story quests removing the pointless running around quests and allocate the XP from them to other MSQ events. That would allow players to progress through the story more quickly without removing the story.

Also, collapse the story only from the previous expansion(s). During a given patch cycle, there should be no skipping or collapsing of story to appease inattentive players who are not interested in the story in the first place.

[TankHunter678]

Level boosts is where WoW fucked up.

My buddy got me a Warlords of Draenor pre-order, it came with a free level 90 character boost.

Thanks to that character boost I did not see any of the previous content from before WoD. I got in, leveled up 10 levels, got to play with a bunch of people who like me did not know how the fuck to play our class. By the time I got to level 100 I was bored of the game.

It was stupidly easy, simple, because they had to make it that way for all the boosted 90s who were fresh new players like me who did not have 90 levels to learn how our class played.

My friend tried to show me the older content, but another friend would get impatient about leveling and have us just go through dungeons. Dungeons I had no real idea why we were in there in the first place. Going to lower level story content would of been pointless at that point, so I STILL did not get to see the "world" of warcraft.

I really do not want to see that happen to this wonderful game.

What they need to do is trim down some of the more pointless busy body quests that do not advance the story much.