Possible level/story jumps....really?

[Velhart]

There are two sides to the argument.

1. When we get to expansions like 5.0, 6.0, or 7.0. Lets say we are at FFXIV 7.0. The first time player who wants to catch up to their friends have, but even if you are skipping CS's, there would be a ton and a ton of content to catch up. It is already quite a trip to catch up from 2.0 to 3.3. Imagine how much you would have to do to catch up, it could be pretty insane.

2. On the other hand, FFXIV is a story driven game, and giving you instant access to areas that you couldn't at your level or progress in the story is a messy thing to program and can be damaging trying to maintain it in the long run.

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Unless SE can come up with something clever, I believe the best route to take is no pay to level feature. Instead, make it so you can get 1-50 from doing only MSQ's alone. Same from 50-60 in 3.0, then 60-70 in 4.0, and so on. Not having to do side quests takes a large chunk of time off. They have already practiced this some for ARR content.

The difference with WoW, despite having a lot of background lore, is not entirely a story driven game. Giving someone access to get to the content their friends are at makes more sense for how that game is structured. In FFXIV's case, I believe it would just be a big mess.

FF14 is not WOW. The casual content is much harder and confusing for any new player. If you let players hit lvl X for the price they paid, they would complain until the end of days asking for content to be nerfed for them. FF14 is one of the only few remaining games that provide a proper challenge for the casual community.

Proper challenge? Like what? If we are going WoW vs. FFXIV, WoW (or at least they use to) has challenging casual content that doesn't completely hold your hand like 95% of FFXIV's content does. SE made Weeping City slightly harder than Void Ark (which was dumb easy) and then people came to complain it was too hard.