Main Scenario Restriction Bloodstorm - Very Very Bad idea.

[Neophyte]

This guy just used its personal crystall ball to tell the best joke of the century. FFXIV is happy to prove it wrong until now and will still continue to do it for years. If, like you said, gating content behing MSQ was sooooooooooo bad,you wouldn't have that much sprouts in the game and SE would have learned their lesson. I'm sure they have a much clearer view on the real impact of their choice that anything you could say.

Speaking of sprouts, it's not the uncommon to see them in Idyllshire, so it took them less than 40 hour to complete a huge part of the MSQ already.

Do your homework. Since 3.25 it's 168h and not 40h anymore.

But sure... in 5.0 we will be fine with requirement to retain sprout pushed to 450h, because of all that MSQ.

Also those sprouts you see in Idyllshire are most likely

• alternate characters
• or people who skipped every single cutscene and/or got carried unsynched through most dungeons (i.e. if they're DPS mains)

You can't complete Heavensward if you watch the entire story within 168h. You can't even reach end of ARR within 40h (maybe with very, very much help). Period.
I don't even have to include the 5-10(?) optional dungeons for that.

If you're worried about bad players in endgame content, that's what the sprouts are for.
Every Player you see with a sprout is less than 168h playing and therefore maybe not experienced enough for current extreme or savage content. That simple.
There is absolutly no difference in player skill after the 168h are over, regardless if they did the MSQ for that time or did lvl 50/60 content right away for all that time.
Oh wait, that's wrong... someone doing 160+h of endgame content is most likely better than someone doing 160+h leveling content (and at least 30h of just watching things).

If you're worried about players skipping the story: Well they do that today anyway, actually you can skip almost every single line of dialogue and cutscene.
Lol, just walk up to any of those sprouts and ask them where Cid comes from... wonder how many say actually Garlemald.

And this is even self-enhancing: The longer new players need to reach endgame after being invited to this game by a friend already being there, the more they are tempted to actually "skip" cutscenes/story just to be able to play with them in content both of them enjoy.

Is there any real argument, beside "they should complete MSQ for the sake of it"? Player skill? Doesn't depend on that. Players should enjoy the story? You can't force them to, you can only force them to teleport->talk NPC->kill 3 monsers->teleport->etc.. but not to actually watch and listen to the story.

So, what exactly is your point?

And also, let me quote my best joke of the century again:

"FFXIV is happy to prove it wrong until now and will still continue to do it for years."

Yeah, and that is why the talk about level jumps and MSQ skipping started because of Yoshi-P himself. And since Yoshi-P is FF14, "FF14" seems not to be happy to prove us wrong.
"It" shares the same concerns as we do.

Yoshida: In terms of the story- the narratives are continuous. The expectation is that the players will start with ARR and continue through the expansion. The lesson with having 3.0 released was that all of the content of the expansion wasn’t accessible until you beat ARR. The feedback, especially from the Western audiences, was that players weren’t able to access any of the Heavensward content until having completed 2.0. We would still like players to get through the story content, but some of the elements in the expansion we’re considering letting players access certain elements without having to complete content from ARR.

Another thing we’re debating internally is whether or not to have something like World of Warcraft’s jumping potion that would work with both levels an story. The Chinese version actually has something similar to this already. I’m trying to decide if something like this should be timed with 4.0.

WoW would have players pay to jump over and skip levels and it’s something that can be considered for FFXIV as well. Of course this isn’t so we can make money off players wanting to skip the content, but there has always been the debate of when we bring in new players, or if an existing player wants to bring in a new player, there’s disparity with the level gap between them, especially if the player has gone through all the content and their friend is just starting. It would be such an effort for the new player to catch up. I feel that we might want to bridge that gap and have that available as an option. Whether or not to actually implement that or offer it as a purchasable option still hasn’t been decided.

We still have some time until 4.0 so we’re hoping to gather more feedback from players out there to see what would be the best course of action for handling this. I’ve talked to a lot of players familiar with WoW and some of them have said “well why didn’t you have your jumping potion with 3.0?”.

http://gamerescape.com/2016/06/17/e3...naoki-yoshida/

Soooo.. thanks for the laugh.