Possible level/story jumps....really?

[Gravton]

I'm all for a "story skip" potion.(well I'm in favor of SE unlocking the story requirement, but someone has to make that Gil.) Level jump? Nah, it takes a week to get to max level in PotD. If you enjoy the story then that's great for you. I followed the story and think it's dumb. The community shouldn't dictate how others should enjoy the game. Maybe they just want to PLAY, not read lines of text or watch a movie.

[Lexia]

I'm all for a "story skip" potion.(well I'm in favor of SE unlocking the story requirement, but someone has to make that Gil.) Level jump? Nah, it takes a week to get to max level in PotD. If you enjoy the story then that's great for you. I followed the story and think it's dumb. The community shouldn't dictate how others should enjoy the game. Maybe they just want to PLAY, not read lines of text or watch a movie.

That affects more then just the msq of the community dictating how others play the game.

[Gravton]

How? How does my knowledge of the lore impact the community?

[Lexia]

How? How does my knowledge of the lore impact the community?

If you asking me, I was saying the community likes to dictate how people play outside of just the MSQ.

[LefeinNoel]

Here is a novel idea. 2 or 3 expansions in; discard the 2.0 story and replace it with one that makes sense with the current timeline. Every game I have ever played suffered from this. It made you feel like you're playing in a time machine.

You can't invest time into this with every expansion. However if you're going to overhaul gameplay to a point the earlier content makes no contextual sense: I see no point in maintaining that content. Our combat is getting a major overhaul with this expansion.

The duties from 2.0 were designed with our old combat system in mind.
Why can level 1-59 players not help out Al Amigo? WoW attempted that with Cata. Went poorly because they tried painting a new landscape over an old one. Poorly.

Want to border ruin your game? Allow players to skip what made the game great. Learning the game in an environment designed to teach it while enjoying it. Overhaul the game, it's combat and most of it's systems? Overhaul your content delivery system to match. Including the content that you're trying to convince your new players to continue to pay and play.

[Enur]

This is why I hate the jump potion. Not because I'm against people skipping levels (honestly it doesn't bother me - you do you), but because people are going to parade it as some solution to the god-awful ARR MSQ restrictions on things like jobs, as this person just did.

I merely advocate for a "skip to the new and shiny expansion you just paid for" potion. Surely you dont expect newcomers to shelf out 60+ dollars for Stormblood and be happy with the amount of work required to reach the part of the game that appealed to them.

I know id be royaly miffed if i bought say WoW Legion and have the game say "nuh uh, the fancy stuff you saw... You can get that in 200 hours. No demon hunter for you lol"

Whether the result is a potion that skips story progress or levels i could not care less about. I am just concerned that Stormblood will fail to draw in as many new players as it potentially could. Seen from a market perspective, the casual player is the most profitable one. SE has at no point tried to hide that FFXIV is a game built around casual, daily, short gameplay sessions. I want the game to succeed, and if this means catering heavily to the player who wants easy and fast access to shiny stuff, so be it.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

snip

So basically, remake the game again again for A Realm Re-Reborn. Would take more time and money than the game itself most likely and the combat system isn't being remade from scratch. The devs are refining jobs so that there's less skill bloat and rotations will be easier to execute. The way we fight won't really change. Then there's also the issue of titles and items you could only get from 2.X that are gone forever with your idea of redoing 2.0, which in turn will have people whining about how they couldn't get the items (heck, to this day we still get some people demanding that all 1.0 content should be unlocked).

[Gravton]

I like the idea of a living story. I'm not saying learning isn't important, it is. But you don't learn how to play by following a story. Dungeons teach players how to play, not story quests. Learning a dragoon' back story doesn't make me better at playing drg. We can have one without the other.

[Belhi]

The people who skip the main story are probably skipping to get to current content quickly. Then they go through 4.0 story and suddenly "I don't understand the story" threads appear everywhere, and the devs have to make the stories independent in the future due to massive backlash.

The WAR in my FC's static has never paid any attention to the story the entire time he has played. He only knows the names of the Scions because they are people he has had to click on to turn in quests. He has never read any quest dialog or watched a cutscene. He didn't even know what Aether was. Frankly he doesn't really care. He has also been a core member of the FC since I joined. my experience is that the argument that people who skip story don't stick around is baseless.

I say this as someone who loves the story and lvled every Job and class just so I could play out the different Job/class questlines.

Here is a novel idea. 2 or 3 expansions in; discard the 2.0 story and replace it with one that makes sense with the current timeline. Every game I have ever played suffered from this. It made you feel like you're playing in a time machine.

You can't invest time into this with every expansion. However if you're going to overhaul gameplay to a point the earlier content makes no contextual sense: I see no point in maintaining that content. Our combat is getting a major overhaul with this expansion.

The duties from 2.0 were designed with our old combat system in mind.
Why can level 1-59 players not help out Al Amigo? WoW attempted that with Cata. Went poorly because they tried painting a new landscape over an old one. Poorly.

Want to border ruin your game? Allow players to skip what made the game great. Learning the game in an environment designed to teach it while enjoying it. Overhaul the game, it's combat and most of it's systems? Overhaul your content delivery system to match. Including the content that you're trying to convince your new players to continue to pay and play.

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of time and work such a overhaul takes. WoW attempted it with Cata and it went poorly because they lacked the staff and resources to completely rework their existing world and make a full expansion at the same time. There is a reason Blizzard pretty much ruled out trying that again and instead have left their lvling story a complete mess.

If they were to try this with FF14 it would take them probably at least the same amount of work as making a brand new expansion. That's about 2 years of content. So, would you want 4 years of half of the normal amount of content or just a 2 year content drought? Its simply not workable.

People need to remember any time they spend reworking old content means time not spent developing new content for existing players. Any major overhauls of past content means content we as endgame players won't be getting as a result because the people who would have been building content for us are reworking all the old stuff instead.

[Jandor]

I merely advocate for a "skip to the new and shiny expansion you just paid for" potion. Surely you dont expect newcomers to shelf out 60+ dollars for Stormblood and be happy with the amount of work required to reach the part of the game that appealed to them.

Why does it need to be a potion though? Surely removing all the requirements for the first quest of Heavensward bar being level 50, the requirements for Stormblood except level 60, and adding a warning before you accept those quests that you'll skip everything before would work just as well?

Removes all the MSQ gating, just grind levels and skip ahead.