New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Voltyblast]

I guess you missed when WoW locked flying behind reputations and quest completion in Warlords of Draenor and every expansion after that.

EDIT: Oh and new races behind reputations and a quest completion as well!

Hmm not exact here: WoD flying is a combination of exploration and reputation, as well as treasure hunting and questing: I'm just checking my achievements on wow and nothing mentions actual main story...because there's no real main story to begin with, each area has their own plotline. And even then even if we were to count them as MSQ, the flying feature is an achievement which means it's skippable.

Same for Legion too: mostly exploration, questing, reputation etc and once again it's an achievement, not a main story feature.

HOWEVER BFA does lock this achievement behind a war campaign so I could say you're right on this one...too bad that you can do it just once and forget on the other alts. Did I forget to mention that these achievements are account bound?

Same for allied race and again, not story related but they are achievements and completely skippable if you don't want them: no story forces you to unlock them.

Heck I can only think of the gravel thing in Legion which actually requires to follow the plotline of Argus.

TL;DR: almost all of the content in WoW, and most other mmorpgs I played including SWTOR, can be entirely skipped because it's entirely optional.

In ffxiv you cannot do endgame without finishing the main story because it's mandatory.