What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[Kosmos992k]

Boring forgetful text reading story. Compared to other MMO's that have a talking NPC at every corner.

Imagine that! A game that actually encourages you to use your imagination.... Shocking!!

[myahele]

I have an alt that I am using to re-experience the story, but I have to say that the "filler" quests in the MSQ is sapping my enthusiasm to continue further.

Here's an example:
The Ladle in the Darkness

Sergeant Cracked Fist needs a hero to make a stew.

Desperate to raise the garrison's floundering morale, Sergeant Cracked Fist has taken a lesson from Gridanian history,and humbly requests that you make a stew and distribute it among the troops. First, obtain the three required chunks of basilisk meat.

You have obtained enough basilisk meat. Take it to the cookfire just outside Camp Bluefog's northern gate, and ad it to the bubbling cauldron.

It will take a little while for the meat to be cooked through. Watch the cauldron until the stew is ready.

Your keen instincts tell you that the basilisk stew is now ready. Scoop it from the bubbling cauldron.

You have three steaming bowls of basilisk stew expertly balanced in your hans. Make your way around Camp Bluefog and give them to the neediest soldiers.

You have doled out all the basilisk stew, which seems to have had the desired effect. Report your success to Sergeant Cracked Fist.

A jubilant Sergeant Cracked Fist thanks you for inspiriting his troops. They now remember their purpose, and stand ready to do their part in the impending phase of the operation.

[DPZ2]

Here's an example:
The Ladle in the Darkness

Funny thing about this and the other 4 quests that follow. Before HW hit, if you weren't level 50 by the time you got to Blue Fog, or slightly undergeared, this quest, and the others in the series involve you in a little bit of combat, explain what's going on in Norther Thanalan so close to the enemy and prep you for that last bit of XP you might need to get to level 50. You can't finish that 4th quest until you hit level 50.

Are they meaningless? Only if you don't believe you deserve that GC rank of Second Lieutenant. They are exactly the sort of things you would do to hearten the troops for the big push that shortly follows.

If you came late to the party, of course you want to whiz through this to get to the 'good stuff'. Perhaps SE will accommodate you, perhaps they can't without radically revising the story line: Cataclysm anyone?

[Gumbercules]

I think the game could greatly benefit from having active skills come in alot sooner in the leveling process with the passive traits coming in later, namely weaved into your "job" levels so you are still getting an active every 5 lvls. This seems like a nice compromise between the current "to bring in new players into the genre" and the vet mmo-er that might want to give this a shot. Could also lead to a faster entry into teaching a new player their roles, for example if a player gets shield oath by 15 he has it as his tanking toolset when hes tanking already, then could get sword oath at 30 to potentially start toying with the idea of stance swapping for dps/phase pushes etc.

[Shurrikhan]

I think the game could greatly benefit from having active skills come in alot sooner in the leveling process with the passive traits coming in later, namely weaved into your "job" levels so you are still getting an active every 5 lvls. This seems like a nice compromise between the current "to bring in new players into the genre" and the vet mmo-er that might want to give this a shot. Could also lead to a faster entry into teaching a new player their roles, for example if a player gets shield oath by 15 he has it as his tanking toolset when hes tanking already, then could get sword oath at 30 to potentially start toying with the idea of stance swapping for dps/phase pushes etc.

One of the big things I'd like to see is just that we get our skills at a level in which we feel like we could really put them to use, or are basically just what were were looking for around the time we got them. The 10% Rampart mitigation at level 2 does nothing for a GLD at its point of acquisition. There's no situation at which we're going to find use for it until we're actually tanking multiple enemies, which only need occur if enemies link or someone in the party has an AoE (and even the earliest of those isn't for a while). Similarly, 51 levels, or 9 from the level cap seems an awful late point in which to add GLD/PLD's single hit burst mitigation. Every additional skill can be a way to add something to what it means to tank on your job, or recommend or allow some additional step or new paradigm in what it means to be a tank in general, and yet so many of our most identity driven abilities are given late, the basic scalar abilities (e.g. Rampart, Foresight) given too early to have a noticeable effect, and numerous other skills just provide more of the same (neither Bulwark nor Sentinel really all that different from Rampart; useful, but lackluster). If the game could just give a sense of class and job identity that much sooner, whether that involves accelerating ability acquisition in the beginning (and therefore slowing it later) or not, I think that'd help a lot with retaining trial players.

[HakuroDK]

Adding my two cents here.

So my mother is a veteran World of Warcraft player, but as a Frost Mage, she was incredibly salty at the issues with her class and the Proving Grounds content which acts as a barrier to a lot of content. But wanting to try something new, I invited her to try FFXIV. Maybe this is a bad example, but she didn't like all of the unskippable cutscenes early on. They've been mitigated since then for sure, but there are still some that are unskippable.

I'm not saying I agree with her--on the contrary, I love FFXIV's story--but I get how new players might not want to invest themselves into the story of a game they're just trying out.

[seekified]

The requirement to plow through the story is the one biggest turnoff, from what I've seen. Even several of my friends who actually do play regularly and have done so since the open beta always sigh and complain when a patch is released and they're "forced" to skip more cutscenes. Naturally, if one doesn't want to be involved it becomes far less interesting, but the sheer scope of the ARR main story quests is an enormous wall to climb for those trying to catch up to the veterans. I don't know if a jump potion or a slimlining of the MSQ is the way to go, but they will have to do something to prevent this wall from growing even more in 4.0.

[Laerune]

Biggest turnoff for the newcomers that I have met are:

1. Boring gameplay, for most of the classes untill you become level 30, you only use 2-3 skills max. WHM was my first class to reach level 30 and doing Stone and Aero was very boring. It does not help that ARR mobs were very easy to kill and do not do alot of damage (they fixed it for HW content though)

2. Story takes its time to develop and there are alot of fetch quests. Minfilia gives you an Eorzea's version of mobile phone and she never uses it to receive your mission report.

3. The rush crowd. One of the things that I dislike when doing a dungeon as a Mentor with another max level player and 2 newcomers is seeing that max level player push around the newcomers, so he/she can finish the dungeon run fast. Newcomers learn nothing, they do not get to enjoy the content and often they get bullied for being new to the content. When it comes to toxic community, FFXIV is a better community then World of Warcraft and League of Legends, but if you look at what happens both ingame and on the forum, you see a rise of toxic behavior.

[Morningstar1337]

2. Story takes its time to develop and there are alot of fetch quests. Minfilia gives you an Eorzea's version of mobile phone and she never uses it to receive your mission report.

TBF, Wiretapping is a thing and something Garlemald can be reasonable expected to be able to do. Not that it justified the sheer about of back and forth we had to do. If anything the scene of us receiving the LS could be cut out and the story would still make sense