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

[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.