Thread: Changes to early game with 5.0?

Originally Posted by Vaer

Last I heard they wanted to work on trimming the quests out so only the important ones are mandatory and moving some of the fetch ones out into optional quests. I believe it is something they have expressed interest in doing for a while now but currently don't have time for since they are in expansion crunch right now.

This is so bizarre to me, from a business perspective. Of course, you can't sustain an MMO with new players alone. An expansion always has to have a decent amount of late-game / endgame content for the existing community. But an expansion release also always draws in new players, yet SE will retain almost none of them if the beginning of the game isn't any good. Now would be the perfect time to finally work on that overhaul they promised almost a year ago.

It’s those after ultima weapon quest right before HW, I made an alt and almost quit myself lol they need to do away with the 2.XX quest and tie it into one question and going into the steps of faith fight. HW isn’t bad and neither is SB but ARR is quickly killing this games new additions quicker then Titan hard mode when it was first introduced XD

Jokes aside I can’t keep friends playing either and they all quit before they reach HW because ARR is such a slog and becomes almost a chore to do.

I've been doing some science on an alt. I only just now cleared Heavensward, so I'd like to say the new player experience needs to be improved substantially. I keep seeing a lot of people treading level 60-65 and rolling dozens of alts but never even reaching Stormblood, which does them a huge disservice in terms of gameplay.

For Shadowbringers, I actually hope they let any new character start at level 50-60 on a job of their choosing, with all relevant content unlocked, so they can actually enjoy the real game. Players that are interested in the storyline then have the option of going to New Game + or, if they want to put less effort in, inn room cutscenes.

I think it would also help if they made all the jobs available when you make your character. They can't do that for Dark Knight, Machinist, and Astrologian since they are in Ishgard, but Samurai and Redmage, Gunbreaker and Dancer are going to start in ARR areas. Even if they don't have job quests till the current level they could let people start them at level 1 when they make their character as long as they have the appropriate expansion installed.

I'm sure the 2.xx post 50 quests were fine at the time, gotta fill out that three year gap somehow.
But those 50 quests are pretty unacceptable now, it's easily the biggest deterrent to newer players when just to finish ARR you have to go through essentially a whole expansion worth of quests, more than 50% of which are menial fetch quests designed specifically to waste your time until the new HW expansion comes out which already happened four years ago.

I don't like streamlining just for the sake of streamlining, but something in there's gotta go.

Have to keep in mind the leveling process in ARR is VASTLY longer than any of the expacs, even if you level through a chunk faster even before all the xp buffs its 50 lvls vs. 10. And this mind set of "the real game" is probably killing more newbies than everything else combined, its like telling them the story is worthless once your 70 and endgame grinding your finally playing FFXIV.

For the record, I've done ARRs entire MSQ 7 times already, hopefully my last round of it will be done before Shadowbringers.