Quote Originally Posted by Dubont View Post
This expansion has made many more people actually consider buying the game and starting fresh characters. People have seen Shadowbringers and thought "wow that must actually be a fun game. I should buy it"

You're worried for nothing
Unfortunately this is also until people realize that it's a really, really long story to get to the newest content. "It's a story MMO, if you don't want..." Yes, yes, we've all heard it a thousand times before. Point being, it's still a really long road unless you drop money to skip it all. There's no other way around it either. Several other, most other, MMOs let you do whatever you'd like to kind of level up and go through the content without too many restrictions.

I hate to say how many friends I've lost because of the grind in ARR alone. "It gets fun at... It starts getting fast at..." It needs to lock people on right off the bat. And FFXIV is growing and that's amazing, but we also have so, so many who don't get through those long, boring spells.