Quote Originally Posted by StriderShinryu View Post
But, at some point, something does have to give. Even if the story is amazing, when your ask for a new a player is for them to spend 500 hours just to get to the current storyline that everyone is raving about as being the best thing ever, it's just too much. So the option then becomes do you just ask them to skip the story via skip pot and potentially not experience it at all (and incur an extra expense just to do so) OR you condense the story in some way to make the 500 hours more easily consumable.
I've mentioned it before but I'll mention it again: instead of encouraging / pressuring your friends into catching up to you, go back and do lower-level content with them as they progress and be patient with them? That's what I do. Do you always encourage your friends to rush through everything (tv shows, books, movie series), just so they can get to the 'good part'? o_o Mine don't. They sit down and re-watch that tv show from the start, with me.

I'm sorry, I genuinely do not understand the validity of this argument: "I want my friends to catch up to me asap, who's been playing x number of years or months, therefore the msq needs to be condescend so they can get there faster."

Am I unexperienced, or do other MMOS give you access to all of the game's content from day 1? Isn't there always going to be a disparity between levels? If a game has been around for 10 years, I'd expect it to take a couple of months for a new player to reach the level of a veteran player.

The topic of ARR being grindy is kinda exhausted. We know it. Everyone knows it. Sure, they could do some more cutting here and there. Lots of filler. But beyond ARR the expansions seem to be just the right length. If you can't cope with the fact the game will keep having expansions that will continue to the story and making it longer, then don't play the game? -_-