How to make the game better for new players?

[MarsAstro]

When the game launched, the msq actually required attention to clear. Perhaps too much attention, given the situation with the Steps of Faith, but they overreacted to those complaints and made the msq mindless from a gameplay perspective.

With sync and such, we need a dungeon difficulty somewhere between their philosophy at launch and whatever the nonsense their current non-difficulty is. They’re leaning too far on visual novel for the msq and not enough on actual gameplay players experience in the game past the outdated (and comparatively nerfed) content.

Yeah, that's actually what motivated me to write this post in the first place. I have a friend who's been interested in trying the game because of the new free trial, but once I told him all the early battle content is easy and slow, he kind of lost all interest. Which I think is a shame, because I love this story and wish it didn't require so much faith in people saying "it gets better".

I don't really think we need a grand overhaul or redesign, I just think they need to tune things so new players can still experience actual gameplay while they do the MSQ. Otherwise it's just a glorified visual novel with a generic first act, which can be kind of a bummer when you're expecting an MMO. It doesn't need to be ridiculously hard or anything, it just needs to offer an actual challenge. It shouldn't take hundreds of hours for the actual game part to become engaging.

[SpiritedMare]

I will echo the many people who have mentioned any/all of the "expanding of the Trust system" issue.

As someone who has a lot of social anxiety myself, one of the things that has hamstringed me the most in this game is "Aughh, I've been enjoying the story so much, but now I am blocked by a required Duty and can't progress until I work up the courage to face strangers and do it!"

My husband plays, but he's the only real friend I have who does. It would have helped me so much, so many times at lower levels, if I had had the option to do a required dungeon with a Trust party. And in the higher-level dungeons where Trusts *are* available, I would have cherished the option to run with him AND two Trust NPCs, rather than having to make the choice of "Hmm, do I wanna do it with him and risk the judgement of two people I don't know, or do I wanna do it with three Trust companions but lose his support and encouragement?".

For those with severe social anxiety, it can be an agonizing choice, and I just feel like it would help so many people overall if they expanded the Trust system in both ways (covers many more dungeons than now, *and* allows you to fill in as many NPCS as needed/queue with partial party, rather than solo-only).