New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[NanaWiloh]

An example of a game with a coherent narrative system that doesnt feel like a slog is the original Guild Wars.

While it has its own flaws, its msq progression was "Go to this story dungeon and run it", because EVERY dungeon was a story dungeon. You could do all the side quests to get money and XP and lore, or you could run the dungeons back to back to back (minus the travel time which also had you exploring its worlds) in short order and get to the endgame first and explore later for all the stuff you missed.




I have a friend who just beat Shiva hard for the MSQ last night. He's 62 or 63 now. Just wants to get to the point where he can run actual content with us without having to spend 70 canadian fakebux to skip most of it. He hasnt picked up a single side quest. Its been a rather awful experience. He finished his free time and is having to debate if the sub is worth it.


The argument that with new expansions people rush to endgame is a good argument... for removing MSQ from dungeons, trials, raids and the like.

Let people experience the MMO content they want to experience in an MMO (like crafting, gathering, raiding, dungeoning, hard content'ing), and do the lore heavy (or sparse) single player slog experience on their own time.

Yes, people expect things in modern MMO's like multiple at level cap dungeons, multiple raids, and multiple side progression paths, at release, in every new expansion. Having those things is how you justify the box prices of subscription models.

Remove the MSQ slog and your stuck with the level and gearing slog. Gearing up in this game is only fast and easy if you got gil or crafting on your side other wise its months of running dungeons until your eyes bleed. So for new players who dont have friends with gil to spare or a crafter to make gear it turns into months of old content to get geared. Lets not even get started on crafting that makes the MSQ slog look like a joke by comparison. The MSQ needs a prune and some gating removed but a complete removal as Crushnight explained is asking for too much.

I dont want to see FF14 become like wow with quests that drop High level gear cause players are impatient and have to be caught up with everyone else RIGHT NOW!!