"Fixing" what isnt broken?

[Daniolaut]

It is possible to complete the A Realm Reborn quest line in 2-3 days.

(via new or preferred world road to 70 bonus, and skipping cutscenes, or just a few weeks watching cutscenes.)




WIth that being stated, I beg to question, if Square-Enix has little interest in keeping veteran players around, vs bringing in more new players.

Sure new players are great, but why take so much away, or ignore existing players, them leaving in droves, just to lure in new players? (this will be addressed down further.)







This can be accomplished by creating a character on a new or preferred world, and skipping cutscenes for free (not using jump potion) on a fresh level 1.

It is also possible to skip all of the story entirely, instantly using jump potions.

Then it takes only a few weeks, if you are going very slow, to complete the story, while enjoying the cutscenes.

Yet, Square-Enix has chosen to "condense" or fix the A Realm Reborn quest line, yet I feel it is not "broken," nor does it "need" condensing.

This uses a lot of resources, time, and recoding. Most importantly changes the story, very likely in a negative way.
They also are talking of removing the second ring slot. This is completely pointless, and only takes more time, resources, and recoding, while also takes away from people glamouring rings.

Meanwhile, things that > do < need addressing are being pushed back.

A list of much more important and impactful issues:

-Housing
-Lack of Male Viera, Female Hrothgar
-Lack of GNB and DNC weapon glamour
-Lack of ability to utilize "purchased" or "rare" hairstyles on Viera and Hrothgar
-Inventory clogging
-Healer balance
-Reporting systems, not only for RMT but problematic players
-BLU still being locked to A Realm Reborn levels
-UI not saving settings
-UI not being fully customizable (looking at you FATE JOINED! Notice, not being capable of being moved from directly in the middle of the screen. As well as all other notices right in the middle.)

The list goes on.

Deleting a secondary ring, and condensing the 2.0 quest line, is completely a waste of time, when these above mentioned issues are very glaring and significantly more important.

To touch on why this is a huge focus on new players versus veterans, here is a list of things that have been taken away, stopped, or no similar incentive for veterans to stay playing the game have been created.

-New subscription/time based Veteran rewards have been haulted (the longer you subscribe, you no longer get new rewards.)
-New Campaigns such as Legacy status have not implemented
-Constant changes to battle jobs, in so much as complete overhauls (many people will leave when their favorite job is completely reworked. Especially when they were not broken to begin with.)
-Any rare and unique items from events or achievements are given out like candy. (Seasonal events put in mog station, rare rewards such as mounts, even the white ravens, being put in events to be obtained much easier and faster.)
-No in-game rewards for veterans, but all sorts of items such as Aetheryte Earring to reward new players. (The longer you play, you arent rewarded with any rare or unique items. Any new ones that are granted, are then given out later for less than half the previous effort.)

In short, new players, with "road to x0" bonus, mog station purchases, events offering older, rare items, Aetheryte earrings, chocobo feathers, so on so forth, are greatly rewarded

Meanwhile

Veterans, have seen the stoppage of new items added for veteran rewards, see all and even their hard earned, unique items given away, have no incentive to stay subscribed, outside of seeing their house destroyed.

So even more sort, new players are rewarded greatly, especially if they spend more money, veterans, are tied to their subscription, or are at threat of losing their house.

Then to top it all off the playerbase encourages this type of approach to the game. Punishing players for stopping their subscription, no rewards for being a loyal customer, and new players seemingly cant be rewarded enough, and "need" an easier time.



The only true reward, I have seen for existing players, that has been implemented, is the anniversary option for bonded characters.




TLDR:

New players are rewarded intensely, exp boosts, items from previous difficult content, so on so forth, for little to no effort.
Veterans are threatened with losing their house if they stop their subscription, and all incentives to stay have been removed/stopped.

Square-Enix now chooses to spend immense resources fixing something that isnt broken, instead of addressing significantly more important issues.

The overall playerbase seems to feel its only good, that rare items be rewarded to new players, new players cant seem to be rewarded enough.

[kitaek27]

I disagree. A lot of people drop the game during the ARR fetch bog. I'm sure Square can see this in their internal stats quite well and realize they need to fix it to retain players. It was objectively the worst part of the game, and its a shame that it keeps players away from enjoying excellent story coming up for them in Heavensward. I also don't think these fetch quests are meaningful effort, so there's no worry that they're being rewarded too much for too little work. Upon seeing or hearing about the ARR grind, a lot of newcomers also buy skips, which I think is the kind of no effort reward that you're talking about. These players jump past most of the game's tutorials and mechanic teaching content, start doing end game content in my queues and fail miserably.

[Hasrat]

Which of your proposed "problems" are actually broken? If they're not broken, why would they need to fix them?

Or, perhaps, is it just because you have a personal bias to see them address things you personally care about?

[Frizze]

Which of your proposed "problems" are actually broken? If they're not broken, why would they need to fix them?

Or, perhaps, is it just because you have a personal bias to see them address things you personally care about?

Ill give him housing as a legitimate issue. Demand greatly exceeds supply on most(?) servers, and the instanced options we have arent as nice as the non-instanced ones. Though i cant take anyone seriously who is still whining about male viera. And just because theyre assigning some people to look at pruning ARR doesnt mean they arent also working on other things.

[Stepjam]

I wouldn't mind if they either added bigger apartment options or instanced housing that's cheaper but doesn't have a neighborhood

[Oo-Sophia-oO]

I'm not really caught up with what changes they are going to make, but removing a ring slot doesn't sound good. I like wearing different rings on my fingers; it makes room for different glamour options!

As for the story, I feel they may need to condense it a bit, but mainly with the fetch quests. As someone who had a mostly positive experience with this game and looks at it in a "glass half full" manner, even I found the filler quests a little tiring. As long as they don't touch the main story, I think some of the fetch quests can definitely be removed. This would make creating an alt and replaying the game from scratch more appealing.

It would be nice to have male Viera and female Hrothgar, as having both sexes for each race in 14 has been the trend. But what has been the official reasoning behind having them gender-locked? I've heard so many different reasonings and I don't know which one of these are official.

[Wolfwritten]

I'm a fairly new player. Played awhile ago and left due to the ARR grind, it was simply too much for me with the free time I had. Ihave come back as my fiancee plays as does her mother, so I'm the designated tank. I'm at lvl 45 Paladn currently and by lord, ARR iss til a struggle.
The pacing seems very laboured. It seems to follow a pattern of build up to something big and then last minute swerve into a side tangent of fetch/run backwards and forwards quests for next 3hours before you can carry on type of affair.
I've never both loved and loathed a game so much in my life!
I started again on twintania when I came back thinking that the x2 xp would solve the issue, not really when the penny drops I was about 3 weeks of mso behind my paladin main I gave up and carried on with my paladin. Some of you may like the glacial pace of the game in the early stage, I keep being told HW onwards is great but it's getting there...

This does need looking at, the supposed disjointed pace between ARR and the rest needs resolving. How many people have quit before hitting HW I wonder?

[Elladie]

If my Free Company is any indication, the majority of new players quit before finishing ARR. Generally the first thing that comes up once the hi and welcomes are done, is the sheer number of quests to reach HW. Some stick it out, most don't. I love the story and dislike skip potions. I have no idea why anyone would want to play if they didn't enjoy a story driven MMO. But saying that, SE really do need to make big cuts to all the fetch quests and do that as a priority.

So I'm sorry, OP, veterans aren't more important than new players, we all pay (more or less) the same sub and the game needs a constant influx of new folks to stay vibrant and relevant

[Reinfeld]

The post-arr level 50 msq is absolutely awful. It made sense back when the cap was 50 and people had nothing else to do, but it's just a bunch of fetch-quest fluff with a little intermingled story. I'm not one to White Knight for SE, it's just that the series of 100 quests is that atrociously bad.

And these developers have different teams that focus on different development projects. Most of the stuff you mentioned likely has zero relevance to the team responsible for quest condensation.