why i quit before reaching endgame (feedback from a new player)

[Barraind]

I don't even understand how you managed to speedrun the game that fast, it took me 28 days to clear 2.0 main story alone, I don't think you ever watched any cutscenes or read any text at all.

My alt made it from 1 to msq done in ~7 days.

Having road to 60, preorder earrings and hat/ring for early levels makes it go fast. Had to feed xp to 1 other class pre-50 and 2 pre-60 to avoid being more than 5 or 6 levels ahead at all times, and only had to do ~12 sidequests in SB (ruby sea from 62-63 and yanxia 66-67). I did 1 roulette and 3 alliance raids other than the required dungeons pre msq done.

Praetorium and Meriandum took as long as 45-50 did.

That's skipping cutscenes.

Cutscenes by length take longer than the entire leveling and instance process of the msq.

[PyurBlue]

Buying the game allows you to play it. But it takes time, and buying the subscription allows you to play it over time. Buying the boost allows you to complete the game without taking time to do it. By skipping, I mean you leave them uncompleted and you just move on to other things. That's not the case here. In some other games, it is an actual skip where you reach the minimum level of the current expansion and they take to the start of the current expansion, but your character still have content from the previous expansion that you didn't complete. So you still have to do them if you ever want anything from the previous expansion.

That is not the case with FFXIV. The boost actually completes the MSQ for you so you unlock a lot of content and reward that you would have otherwise needed to do.

Thus, you're not paying twice like you would have in other games for actually skipping. What you're paying for is for the game to complete the content for you. You didn't just skip over it.

This doesn't seem like a significant distinction to me. If you bought FF14 primarily to participate in something locked behind the MSQ you have to pay additional money to play the content right away. It's the same as with the other games. While the content you don't want to play might be handled a little differently, that probably doesn't matter if you didn't want to play it in the first place. FF14 flagging the skipped content as done could be a disadvantage too. If the player skipping wanted to do the skipped content at their own pace, the skip potion forever takes that content away from them (but this is fixed in Shadowbringers).

Maybe I can make it clearer by putting it another way. The skip potion and similar items have you paying to solve problems made by the devs. Paying to save time is completely valid, but in FF14 the time investment only exists because the developers put it into the game. They didn't have to and paying for it just reinforces it as a good business strategy for them. SE absolutely deserves to make money for their products of course but when you end up paying the devs to sell you solutions to problems that shouldn't exist, it hardly seems fair to have to pay. It makes some sense with the level skip because leveling helps to keep dungeons alive. Making players go through the MSQ on the other hand has very little effect on the game as a whole since it's a solo experience.

What I said was I wouldn't object to some sort of skip potion being made free, I still have big issues with suggestions here about the devs changing how the MSQ is being done to make it optional from the get go. I don't disagree to some of the post ARR MSQ quests being shortened but that's as far as I would take it. A lot of people here have advocated to FFXIV having a story structure like WOW or XI which I'm strongly opposed to.

In both threads I went out of my way to say that changing the nature of the MSQ would not be the right way to make the MSQ optional. Optional MSQ simply means the player can choose to their MSQ progress flags checked or not, exactly like the current skip potion but free. FF14 wouldn't change at all for players enjoying the story and willing to watch cutscenes. SE would follow the same formula that it has used from the beginning. The only difference would be that players would gain the option jumping to the end of MSQ as if they had played through it.

While the MSQ wasn't for me, I understand that everyone has their own preferences and I know what it's like to lose something you enjoy. I really, really don't want to take that away from you, I promise. Sometimes you can't please everyone, but I don't think an agreeable solution is out of reach on this issue.

[Sicno]

I think I'll leave this here.

[SerLuke]

I think I'll leave this here.

[linay]

This doesn't seem like a significant distinction to me. If you bought FF14 primarily to participate in something locked behind the MSQ you have to pay additional money to play the content right away. It's the same as with the other games. While the content you don't want to play might be handled a little differently, that probably doesn't matter if you didn't want to play it in the first place. FF14 flagging the skipped content as done could be a disadvantage too. If the player skipping wanted to do the skipped content at their own pace, the skip potion forever takes that content away from them (but this is fixed in Shadowbringers).

It is a significant distinction when you're claiming that you're paying for the game twice. Regardless of your interest in the part that is affected by the boost, when you use the boost, you get the benefits of the quests that are completed for you at a fraction of the time it would've taken were you to do them manually, like minions and mounts and unlocked dungeons. So it's not like you're paying for nothing, aka being charged twice for the same thing.

Maybe I can make it clearer by putting it another way. The skip potion and similar items have you paying to solve problems made by the devs. Paying to save time is completely valid, but in FF14 the time investment only exists because the developers put it into the game. They didn't have to and paying for it just reinforces it as a good business strategy for them. SE absolutely deserves to make money for their products of course but when you end up paying the devs to sell you solutions to problems that shouldn't exist, it hardly seems fair to have to pay. It makes some sense with the level skip because leveling helps to keep dungeons alive. Making players go through the MSQ on the other hand has very little effect on the game as a whole since it's a solo experience.

The time investment only exists because that is the nature of a growing game that is continuously expanded at a regular frequency. If you're not willing to invest the time in a growing game and not willing to pay to go through the provided shortcut, then maybe look for a static game that doesn't grow.

[Melorie]

In FF9 you don't get to teleport. But seriously 90% is and exaggeration for either game. Though both have points where you may have to spend half an hour or more of reading mostly it's is broken up with dungeons and stuff. In either game you can take a break from the main story and go grind something or play a mini game if you like.

You're missing my point. I'm not saying that FF9 is perfect or better than FFXIV - theyre completely different games, I'm saying that justifying any MSQ criticism with "well, it's a final fantasy game" doesn't really make sense. Pacing and balance are also traits that you have to consider while telling a story in a game.

Actually the thing you will probably spend the most of your time in FF9 is cutscenes most specifically the going into and out of combat cutscenes and yes they are cutscenes they wrest control away from the player to be all swoosh whoa do i look cool for a normal battle yet? XD

I don't mind cutscenes per se. I don't think that cutscenes or story are the problem, but how the player feels towards doing them is important. You can make a cutscene good to watch or you can make it boring. You can make certain blocks of texts very impacting or you can make it a slog to read. You can make the player finish a quest without making him sniff chocobos and teleport 0328509804 times just to say something that could've been said through a linkpearl.

And as I said like everytime I post in those threads, I LOVED doing the history on FFXIV, but I know that I'm not the majority and I've meet way too many people that decided to give up on the game because the way they handle the history (HANDLE the history, I'm not saying that the history existing is a bad thing and I bet that these people that got burnt out also deep down doesn't) and I think that SE should develop solution that it's not only "skip everything" or "spend dozens of hours of your time just reading blocks of text and teleporting".