Quote Originally Posted by Nulien View Post
I can't imagine it would be all that much time and money wasted... all the content is already there, NG+ just provides a way to re-enable it. A lot of people never touch the cutscene journal in the inn, but I wouldn't call that a waste either.
They basically had to recode every quest in the game up to Stormblood to enable it, and put in a dynamic phasing system. That's a LOT of work, for a game that didn't initially have the framework for it, and was possibly only justified by having to redo ARR.

But I mean, I kind of understand both sides here?

On one hand, story focus or no story focus, FFXIV is still kinda supposed to be a game. The MSQ isn't exactly engaging to *play* and the plot pre-Shadowbringers is a series of shining highlights amidst a sea of tedium and drudgery, so the least it can do is offer some minor form of progression in the name of engaging the player to suffer until they see what the moments they're interested in.

The main stickler, and likely what the devs omitted exp for, is that giving exp would encourage spamming the shortest chapter possible for the biggest gains.

What they can do to stave this off is having like a weekly cooldown on the exp given for any story quest. If people don't have problems with solo players spamming dungeons slowly with trusts to get tomestones, they surely wouldn't have an issue with people clicking Alphinaud for five hours once a week for exp.