New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Anselmet]

I actually don't recall HW and SB bothering me too much, but ARR has forever instilled a hatred for Minfilia in me due to her constant back and forth. We have a bloody linkpearl, woman! USE IT!. lol. But yeah, I'm happy they've cleaned things up in the later expansions.

My own personal gripe is that it's all required. My first MMO was XI, and you had the option to jump around to story lines as you wished and had no need to actually complete a line if it didn't suit your fancy. It could make for some rather chopped-up story telling depending on how you went about it, but having the option is nice. GW2 was next for me, and they also let you complete the MSQ at your own pace.

When given the choice, I very much prefer to have the story be something I can do when I have the time and not be something that is going to lock me out of items unless I complete it in full. There is probably some middle ground that could be found, but I don't think they'll alter their path too much. I think someone earlier had mentioned that SE is planning to address the ARR MSQ around 5.1 or so (I don't have an actual source for this, so I'm not positive). If that is true, that can only help the new player experience, and will hopefully be enough to keep them chugging along.

I'll admit I agree with you on several points here. But here are my main issues with making the msq optional. If you are a new player, especially one that is not used to mmos then the msq serves as a great funnel towards the end of the game. My issues that I have had with other mmos where the story is either 1. irrelevant or 2. just plain mmo bad story is that I rushed aimlessly from one place to the next and felt extremely lost. Originally, to keep up with a friend in ffxiv I skipped the story from level 30 onwards and did not return to experience the story until I made an alt. This left me extremely lost and confused as to what I was doing as a new player to ffxiv. The msq grounded me more than any other mmo has. I hated the fetch questing and Minfillia, to a point then. I loath going through ARR now, but I have to respect it due to it at least being a compass.

But that is not the only reason I feel the msq is important. That funnel I was talking about leads players to a lot of exp. I cannot fathom what it would be like if the msq was marginalized and suddenly the whole game was open. The amount of wondering from zone to zone and stumbling about that I would have done as a new player would have honestly lead me to quit, if I'm frank. And as much as I hate ARR bloat, one of my worries to them removing quests is all that delicious exp we get will be gone in side quests. At the moment the exp gained from dungeon and msq allows players to rarely run into a road block. Hopefully they will realize that and make the msq quests just have more exp given.

Another reason I think that ffxiv is not doing what ffxi did is that the devs want it to be intentionally linear. To them, they may believe that this funneling of new players (new and old to mmos) will help guide them to end game. Instead of the end of the game just being a lvl number ffxiv ensures that you are at the level when you are finished at the end and have a good map of the game to explore. Excluding ARR's almost 300 quests, this game is very newbie friendly. And I have a feeling the dev team believes that the msq is newbie friendly as well and its why the chose this model. Not saying that they couldn't have designed the game another way such the games you have suggested, but merely the chose not to. And with them wanting to introduce newgame plus and reduce msq in ARR, I really don't think they will remove the msq to be optional.