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

[Zaene]

Most MMOs "gate" content behind things. How is anyone going to get a sense of progression without having to DO THINGS to be able to DO OTHER THINGS? Now, I can appreciate that especially in a game like WoW and even here, there is a lot of content to get through before you get to end-game. That's just par for the course though.

FFXI had Chains of Promathia. There were amazing zones deeply gated behind 3 difficult encounters called "Promyvions". The feeling from beating those encounters and gaining access to new zones was amazing.

Now, times have certainly changed since then and the general difficulty of content has lowered substantially, however, I believe that content should still be gated behind story. Sure you might want to play the game only as an armorer, but you have to admit it would be a little odd.

[TankHunter678]

Most MMOs "gate" content behind things. How is anyone going to get a sense of progression without having to DO THINGS to be able to DO OTHER THINGS? Now, I can appreciate that especially in a game like WoW and even here, there is a lot of content to get through before you get to end-game. That's just par for the course though.

FFXI had Chains of Promathia. There were amazing zones deeply gated behind 3 difficult encounters called "Promyvions". The feeling from beating those encounters and gaining access to new zones is amazing.

From what I heard WoW had an entire flowchart from vanilla all the way up to wrath of things you had to do to unlock other things that eventually culminated in unlocking the final raid tier and defeating the last boss of the expansion. Then after that it was get to max level and have a high enough ilvl to unlock and run the raid tiers.

[Snow_Princess]

Most MMOs "gate" content behind things. How is anyone going to get a sense of progression without having to DO THINGS to be able to DO OTHER THINGS? Now, I can appreciate that especially in a game like WoW and even here, there is a lot of content to get through before you get to end-game. That's just par for the course though.

FFXI had Chains of Promathia. There were amazing zones deeply gated behind 3 difficult encounters called "Promyvions". The feeling from beating those encounters and gaining access to new zones is amazing.

Ya but FFXI had it in parallel, you did not have to beat the base or RoZ to go there. It would be no different then letting you go SB here without doing 2.0 or HW if you are level 60.

Some kind of gating is ok, not 23832329823912832 million level 50 quests that are mostly run to some place, run to some other place, run to some other place, go back to where you started, then run to a 5th place for no reason.

You also bring up a good point, FFXI in getting access felt like an achievement, gating behind Run to A run to B run to C just seems like pointless busy work, no challenge.