As a new player that really likes this game ...

[RichardButte]

I liked the story, and making it mandatory is ok. But not with soooo many pointles quests, mostly in the ARR story. I just started skipping dialogues all the way until I hit HW questline, which is my favourite. Just so so many fetch quests that I ended up "disconected" from the story.

The ARR endgame slog is a goddamn nightmare, yes.

The problem is that you're slogging through over 100 quests that had previously been released over the period of a year plus as just bits of extra endgame questing.

But doing them ALL IN A ROW like the game makes you do is basically the sales pitch for selling jump potions, and it's exceedingly effective.

I have a friend grinding through it right now and although he loves story in games (including XIV), I can tell it's starting to grate on him. The real problem is that, throughout these quests, there's a notable lack of "story" in the main STORY questline and is instead mostly just running back and forth across zones for another few windows of dialogue that tell very little.

But there's a reason FFXIV lacks the "hardcore pve community wow has"... and that reason is

...its raid encounters are far too easy and don't offer the consistent challenge that WoW's do, which has nothing to do with "being like WoW", otherwise all of the games out there harder than WoW (like EVE Online) would be "more like WoW" and that absolutely isn't true.

FFXIV is a WoW clone in that it's a themepark MMO and designed with the same level cap and gear gating that WoW features. The way both games handle the level cap and gearscores are identical.

The key difference is that the WoW team does a much better job in designing raid encounters while the XIV team does a better job in the number of side pursuits you'll find in the game, overall handling of story, and does a much, MUCH better job of fostering a more helpful in-game community.

Really, if XIV's devs could step their raid game up (and they may well do this with SSavage), then XIV will be a generally better version of WoW all around.