What does the scenario skip potion not give you?

[Trensharo]

I'll never understand why someone would pay for a game then pay even more money on top of that to skip playing the game they just paid for. It's illogical.

People who don't understand don't get to tell others whether it's logical or not.

You've been here since 2014. Your view on this differs fundamentally from someone just getting into the game.

Most MMORPGs these days, more than a few years old, have Level Boost Potions. Why? Because they all have the same issue. This issue is present in every level-based MMORPG. As the game ages, the aggregate moves up in average level and forward in content progression. This means that the early game gets worse and worse as the game gets older.

Because games bring in less and less players "at a time" as they age, this disproportionately affects new players. It means a game designed with the social component being at its center feels like a very badly developed single player RPG game to them. Many of them burn out and quit.

The story skip potions are necessary in this game only because progression is gated by the MSQ. Otherwise, they'd only need a Level Boost - like EQ, EQ2, WoW, Rift, GW2, etc.

Also, something about how the quests and cut scenes function mechanically feels like it slows you down considerably when questing in this game. I feel like I get less value per hour out of this game than many others. It IS a subscription game, after all.

If it will take a casual 3 months to level to 60 on limited playtime, than that is not really any worse value than just paying (almost the same amount of cash) for the Story and Level Skip Potions...

The bad thing is that a player would have to reroll just to go back and do that content, which wouldn't be the case in other games - where they can go back and work through the lore - even if the quests are grey/low level. Because the MSQ is used as a mechanic to limit character progression, it means you must take it off the table completely (aside from character rerolls/alts) if you offer any mechanic to allow those characters to skip forward to "current content." It would have been nice if it weren't this way, that way players could always go back on their second jobs and level through it casually after they have caught up to their friends/family/whatever on their character's first/main job.

I like the content design and some aspects of the community in this game. The smaller party sizes and 8 man raiding (WoW ditched 10 mans /mourn ), but I did have exponentially more fun leveling/questing in EQ2, WoW, and GW2 than I am currently having in FFXIV. Something about how it's all integrated together feels super grindy to me.