What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[Shurrikhan]

3. Artistic differences

If I may ask, are we talking terrain and character/mob model aesthetics, zone layout, UI, or some less visual form of art?

For instance, the fact that at least on my lower end computer, ground terrain and brush seem to flicker constantly during movement and at-distance drawn portions of terrain can include some really huge features to be adding in at some 100 yards away (chunks of mountains, etc.), whereas I won't find those issues or certain not as much in MMOs with a more cartoony or watercolor-ish style. If I were to correlate those issues with the art style, would my dislike be due to artistic difference (preferring one style and what all it includes or what compromise comes with it, over another)?

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

I may be blowing anecdotal evidence out of proportion, but I do at least know that I'm not the only one who will turn off NPC voices because they prefer their imagination over the (typically mediocre at best) voiceactor.

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?

I apologize for how tangential this will be, but just some food for thought:

Let's say there's a MMO that added playable races as the game progressed, but had them locked behind certain bits of quest and particular levels. Similarly, that race would then start at the acquisition level, and, because they had a completely different MSQ from character creation up to a point some eight to fifth of the way to level cap beyond when you could acquire said race, they were automatically progressed in story as well. The idea is that you now get to see the 'other perspective', wherein the actions of your previous character can even have an effect on the side-MSQ of the new one, while simultaneously limiting the playerbase's "rarer" races and allowing races that are supposed to be naturally more powerful to feel more powerful at creation (in this case, because their entry level is some third or half way to level cap for another race) and allowing their MSQ to feel entirely their own so much of that development time being missed by, or outside the interest of, those players who will only play the traditional or humanoid races (hook em' with plots they already know and hopefully enjoyed, and make them enjoy it even more through just the right amount of variance to be new yet connected — ominous and provocative).

Okay, long intro, but here's the reiteratable part: you can release side-content, visible to both the original and redacted MSQ lines, that can replace or be substituted for the MSQ without having to cut out any of its prior development time, thereby wasting it, nor only attracting the interest of new players (not that they'd know there had even been a change, if the redaction had been made directly to the original line). In many cases, it can even have a much greater sense of identity, or can even build up fellow hero archetypes that might be used later, by the original or any other redacted line, as well.