Quote Originally Posted by Voltyblast View Post
That's a major reason why most players won't bother with the game to begin with: why bother with the expansion, if you need to play the entirety of the previous game JUST to unlock it? Other games don't do it, even SWTOR which is story driven. I do like campaigns and story modes in mmorpg, but not when they lock gameplay stuff. Keep the story, don't remove it, because I do like having an objective even if I don't care about it, but don't lock everything behind it: you won't incite new players to join if this is how things go.
To be fair, even WoW before WoD expansion required you to go through the leveling process of 1-80 before you could get to the new content. FFXIV is the same, except that leveling process is through the MSQ. It's atrociously longer (and much more tedious if story isn't your cup to tea to begin with) when the MSQ process mostly devolves to fetch quests, and double that with post 2.0 MSQ being a requirement as well, so it's not just the leveling but the story progression as well (which...includes the aforementioned fetch quests).