An option for characters to start at level 50, pre-heavensward, for FREE

[Seraphor]

Maybe... Maybe the game doesnt need to cha ge to attract the WoW crowd. They can either stay playing WoW, or make an informed decision on their own. This game is doing fine, and if you start changing its core, it would alienate its own player base to attempt to attract players who like a different core.

But this isn't changing it's core, it isn't changing anything about the game. It's offering an ARR skip for free, once the game gets too big and there's too much story to slog through.

ARR is the worst part of the game. The quests are too long winded and vacuous, and there's far too many pointless ones, and you'd get to avoid the nonsense that is the Praetorium, if playing the story firsthand doesn't concern you.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

But this isn't changing it's core, it isn't changing anything about the game. It's offering an ARR skip for free, once the game gets too big and there's too much story to slog through.

ARR is the worst part of the game. The quests are too long winded and vacuous, and there's far too many pointless ones, and you'd get to avoid the nonsense that is the Praetorium, if playing the story firsthand doesn't concern you.

In that case you can pay to skip. I never found the story terrible, and I've done it a few times. Endgame is not everything, and is a pretty small part of this games overall content. Especially now, with the 3rd expansion coming out, there is a lot less endgame than there is content leading up to it.

[Seraphor]

In that case you can pay to skip. I never found the story terrible, and I've done it a few times. Endgame is not everything, and is a pretty small part of this games overall content. Especially now, with the 3rd expansion coming out, there is a lot less endgame than there is content leading up to it.

I feel like you've missed the entire discussion.
The game is receiving a large influx of new players, many have come from games like WoW, many have come via recommendations from friends, and a lot fall into both boxes.
These people make up a significant portion of the player base now, and they want to play with their friends, not dredge through 6 years of story content on their own before they can do so, or have to pay more money for the privilege.

I've personally welcomed a friend who used to play WoW, after they liked the look of Shadowbringers. They quit at level 40 from burnout.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I feel like you've missed the entire discussion.
The game is receiving a large influx of new players, many have come from games like WoW, many have come via recommendations from friends, and a lot fall into both boxes.
These people make up a significant portion of the player base now, and they want to play with their friends, not dredge through 6 years of story content on their own before they can do so, or have to pay more money for the privilege.

I've personally welcomed a friend who used to play WoW, after they liked the look of Shadowbringers. They quit at level 40 from burnout.

That's on them for trying to burn through 6 years of content in a week. Also, you can play with your friends in older content. I ferried around mine, did the dungeons with them, chatted on discord.

And I'd like to see your stats and source on them being a significant portion. People got burned out at lvl 40 years ago, that just means they rushed too much or the game wasn't for them. That's OK. The game doesn't have to be for everyone. I didn't like WoW, and I only tried to play during vanilla. I didn't like XI either.

[Veliena]

I feel like you've missed the entire discussion.
The game is receiving a large influx of new players, many have come from games like WoW, many have come via recommendations from friends, and a lot fall into both boxes.
These people make up a significant portion of the player base now, and they want to play with their friends, not dredge through 6 years of story content on their own before they can do so, or have to pay more money for the privilege.

I've personally welcomed a friend who used to play WoW, after they liked the look of Shadowbringers. They quit at level 40 from burnout.

Honestly if they don't want to dredge through 6 years of story, they probably aren't a good fit for ffxiv. Like others have said, thats fine, the game doesn't have to appeal to everyone, its better that it doesn't. I don't care if they came from other games like wow, I came from wow years ago myself. The difference is, I didn't show up and start complaining because things weren't how I thought they should be. If the players joining are trying to make ffxiv a wow2, please stay away.

[Ronduwil]

I feel like you've missed the entire discussion.
The game is receiving a large influx of new players, many have come from games like WoW, many have come via recommendations from friends, and a lot fall into both boxes.
These people make up a significant portion of the player base now, and they want to play with their friends, not dredge through 6 years of story content on their own before they can do so, or have to pay more money for the privilege.

I've personally welcomed a friend who used to play WoW, after they liked the look of Shadowbringers. They quit at level 40 from burnout.

I just came over from WoW, and I'm overjoyed that to find an MMO that still takes the leveling experience seriously. I'm level 39 in my main class, have all my DoH/DoH classes at 30+ now, and I'm nowhere close to burning out. Given your friend's short attention span, maybe this game just isn't for him. He can always go back to WoW. He can get a free boost to level 110, and then he can rush his way to level 120 in a couple of weeks. From there, they have a bunch of catchup mechanisms that can have him raiding at the highest levels by the month's end. As for this game, I don't think they should change a thing. I bought the game to play through it, not to skip straight to the end.

Besides, what makes you think that your friend wouldn't have burned out anyway even if he'd been boosted to 50?

[Penthea]

I feel like you've missed the entire discussion.
The game is receiving a large influx of new players, many have come from games like WoW, many have come via recommendations from friends, and a lot fall into both boxes.
These people make up a significant portion of the player base now, and they want to play with their friends, not dredge through 6 years of story content on their own before they can do so, or have to pay more money for the privilege.

I've personally welcomed a friend who used to play WoW, after they liked the look of Shadowbringers. They quit at level 40 from burnout.

I feel like players who say "they want to play with their friends" conveniently forget that lvl sync is a thing. Sorry but this "can't play with friends" argument just doesn't fly in FFXIV. If you can't play with your friends due to a lvl gap, it's because someone is refusing to play certain content.

Also lets not put all WoW players in the same basket. I played WoW for ten years and I had no problem adapting to FFXIV. I never felt as if the story shackled me. In fact I was very impressed that FFXIV presents meaningful content from the very beginning, unlike WoW in which said content won't start until you hit current expansion section of the game.

I know a lot of players who played WoW for just as long as I did and they never felt allergic to the msq or the act of working through a game. Of course some did, but these were people who often disliked having to work through any kind of progression in WoW so it wasn't surprising that they didn't like it in another game as well.