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

[Skivvy]

What? Of course they did, at least back in classic XI. You wanted to play in {sky} or {sea} then you had to do the MSQ at least up until the final chapter. I remember having to join a static to get through the Chains of Promathia expansion because there was no duty finder, either.

Pardon my pasting of my previous comment, but please see below:

Dynamis required only rank 6 in your home nation (out of 10). Sky access is granted on quest 13 out of 18. Sea is available on 7.something out of 8.something (this is one of the later access points). But then you also had content like assaults and Nyzul that unlocked at mission 3 out of 48. Also, gear is not factoring in here - of course you would have to dive deeper if you wanted to get the latest/greatest BIS items - but the point is you didn't HAVE to if you didn't want to.

As I stated before, flexibility in an MMO is never a bad thing.

My point in comparing XI's story handling with XIV is that XI never forced you to complete every past expansion to get into current content as XIV does. You could specifically unlock Sea if that's what you wanted to do, or maybe you just wanted to do Assaults. That was fine! Yes, you had to complete missions up to a certain point within a single expansion (some also had rank/level/cross-expansion reqs as well, but not all) but it never required a full completion of all previous storylines. Completing a storyline did come with additional rewards, but full-completion was left up to the player's choice.

And no offense, but I don't really see how duty finder comes into this particular as we're not discussing the difficulty of XI vs. XIV.

Just to reiterate what I mentioned in other comments, I am not asking for XIV to simply adapt XI's style of mission handling. I am also not asking them to take away the large story. My mentioning of XI was more to show the people who are simply going "LALALA THIS IS A STORY-BASED GAME, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT??!" that SE has indeed used other methods before, while also keeping a huge story in the game. It's not like 100% full completion is the only option that could work in this game.