Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
Also, even if the 250-hour story was condensed down to something like 150, you sound like you'd still be complaining about what was left of it.
(For the record, 100 hours is a length that would be seen as a selling point for a single JRPG, and FFXIV is essentially four of them back-to-back at this point.)
You can see this is true with a reply from someone else after your post was made, where they refer to the MSQ as the 'padding' to the game. This basically implies that they view the MSQ as pointless drivel that they have to get through to get to the 'real' game (that is how I interpret these comments).

So yes, even if SE did cut the story in HW, SB & patches between to reduce total time-to-complete from say ~250 hours down to ~100-150... these same people would continue to make these threads demanding the MSQ be further butchered and cut down and made into side-content / non-existent / ignorable.

These are the same ppl who are now complaining that WoW forces ppl to do story in their latest expansion, rather than letting them skip it all to get to the endgame raiding.

That's exactly the issue with asking for large-scale trimming of the story. You trim something back to "the bare minimum needed to understand the plot" and you lose everything around it that builds up the characters and makes the plot richer.

You can't just pull entire events out of the plot and say "we're doing this for the sake of some people who don't enjoy the story anyway so they want it to go quicker".
Makes real sense right - lets butcher the story for ppl who do not like the story, and don't want to play the story, who will continue to ask us to butcher the story so they can skip the story. Also, sorry to the majority who like the story... but we've butchered the story for ppl who don't want the story in the game, even though they are a vocal minority.