Possible level/story jumps....really?

[bass9020]

So the Gamer Escape interview with Yoshi came out and I found this little juicy answer SO INFURIATING... is this honestly needed? Why do people play games if they don't want to work for anything. We already have people who can barely play there jobs and now you want to hand them already leveled/story completed characters? ill just never understand.

Yoshida: In terms of the story- the narratives are continuous. The expectation is that the players will start with ARR and continue through the expansion. The lesson with having 3.0 released was that all of the content of the expansion wasn’t accessible until you beat ARR. The feedback, especially from the Western audiences, was that players weren’t able to access any of the Heavensward content until having completed 2.0. We would still like players to get through the story content, but some of the elements in the expansion we’re considering letting players access certain elements without having to complete content from ARR.

Another thing we’re debating internally is whether or not to have something like World of Warcraft’s jumping potion that would work with both levels an story. The Chinese version actually has something similar to this already. I’m trying to decide if something like this should be timed with 4.0.

WoW would have players pay to jump over and skip levels and it’s something that can be considered for FFXIV as well. Of course this isn’t so we can make money off players wanting to skip the content, but there has always been the debate of when we bring in new players, or if an existing player wants to bring in a new player, there’s disparity with the level gap between them, especially if the player has gone through all the content and their friend is just starting. It would be such an effort for the new player to catch up. I feel that we might want to bridge that gap and have that available as an option. Whether or not to actually implement that or offer it as a purchasable option still hasn’t been decided.

We still have some time until 4.0 so we’re hoping to gather more feedback from players out there to see what would be the best course of action for handling this. I’ve talked to a lot of players familiar with WoW and some of them have said “well why didn’t you have your jumping potion with 3.0?”.

Full interview here: http://gamerescape.com/2016/06/17/e3...naoki-yoshida/

Here is another thread that has a poll going so incase people would like to vote or check out the votes! http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Please-vote%21

A thread detailing the potion from the Chinese version with similar discussions- http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...umping-Potions