How to make the game better for new players?

[MarsAstro]

While the ARR rework was a great step in the right direction, I feel like there are still two major problems with the game for new players:

1. Playing with friends from the get-go is difficult/inconvenient because of the solo nature of the Main Scenario
2. Old group content is laughably easy, making it disappointing and pointless

Some might argue that length of story is an issue too, but personally I feel like the length is fine as long as the game is enjoyable along the way.

Personally, I have two features I've been thinking about.

The first one is to make the MSQ less solo, by adding a group-sync feature. This feature would allow people who play in a group, and who are at the same spot in the MSQ, to watch cutscenes synced. Non-voiced cutscenes would wait for everyone in the party to read a text before continuing, and voiced cutscenes would wait for everyone and play at the same time to sync up what's happening. This way people could read/watch the story simultaneously and react/discuss live, almost like watching a movie together.

The second one is to expand the trust system and add difficulties to it. Make trusts work for trials too, make undersized parties able to fill their missing spots with AI's, and expand it backwards so it works for all of the old content too. Then add easy, normal and hard difficulty, to allow players to adjust how challenging they want the content to be.

Obviously, both of these suggestions would be massive undertakings, and the second one could potentially introduce a lot of problems for the game as an MMO. So I'm interested in hearing what you think could be done to fix these things, or potentially what other problems you feel there are that need fixing. Also, feel free to tear apart my two suggestions, I know they've got a lot of issues.

[MPK]

Nothing. It's perfectly fine as it is. They can buy level skips and story skips to skip the MSQ if they want to.

[Bright-Flower]

A group sync could help a little but here's the thing. The game has soooo muuuuuuch dialog and cutscenes in the msq that even if you make it easier to do the gameplay bits together without a friend outleveleing it to absurd degrees, you're still either going to have either the friend sietting there bored while the newbie reads through it all, or the newbie skipping it and missing out in order to keep things moving.

There's really not an easy fix to that. The quests, outside of dungeons etc where you HAVE to group up, were written largely like a single player experience.

[Takamorisan]

Like your suggestion just pick one type of player thats the person that just want to engage with FFXIV MSQ and thats it.
If anything I'd suggest quite the opposite regarding the story length, prune all the non voiced cutscenes, I know its empyrical evidence but out of 5 new friends that started playing FF last month, they all had the consensus of that the story overstay its welcome and start being an unnecessary padding with chit-chatter cutscene as they classified. They only start enjoying some parts of HW and fully ShB.

Content wise they need to spread the actions much better than they do now, lots of players don't learn their until 75-80 because how their toolkit is spread and there is no time to practice with their new abilities. Yeah content could ramp up the difficulty so they don't feel like the game is hand holding then until savage or extreme if they wish so to engage with.

[Keramory]

Watching my wife play I'd probably remove some of the permanent trial deaths on Leviathan and Titan now. Not for extremes but for a group of noobies I think it's a little much for something so relatively insignificant in the story now.

It wont happen, but the overall quality of life I'd suggest would be slowing down button mash of our abilities considerably. Granted this has always been a huge ME annoyance, I never enjoyed how every second of a raid I need to be pressing something while also playing DDR with a boss. I can handle it obviously. Many here can handle it. For people like my wife it's overly obnoxious. She switched to FFXI recently because of this. The combat is far more laid back. MMO's to many players should be relaxing and having 3 bars of commands that all need to be hit perfectly is obnoxious. This isn't even an endgame thing, this is combat overall. Non-stop button mashing. I don't even understand why we have auto attack animations because you'd never see it if you're doing your job even kind of correctly. Kind of an old man yelling at a clouds thing and it won't happen because now you have a different game entirely, but I've seen that bar more people from FFXIV then anything else.

[Seraphor]

2. Old group content is laughably easy, making it disappointing and pointless.

The upcoming stat squish in 6.0 might address this a little, as the gap between min ilvl and synced ilvl will be smaller. But this will only be apparent in level 51-80 content.

I would love a party level sync that was toggleable in the open world zones. Either completely free to choose what ilvl you want to set everyone to up to their current ilvl, or just sync everyone down to the lowest ilvl in the party.

[Jeeqbit]

1. Playing with friends from the get-go is difficult/inconvenient because of the solo nature of the Main Scenario

While I agree with this, as a new player I found others to play with by queueing for dungeons.

2. Old group content is laughably easy, making it disappointing and pointless

That depends on the person. Some people want a game they play to be easy and others want it to be extremely hard. I believe games should have a difficulty setting.

There could be a setting to get matched for things minilvl or alternatively a setting to adjust the display of telegraphs to make it harder only for yourself.

The length of the story is not completely a problem, because you don't need to be max level to enjoy all the content in the game. You can do all sorts of things at lower levels, but you do need to get far enough to do the content you're interested in. I see a lot of new players find contentment in lower level content such as the Gold Saucer.

The best example of how well watching cut scenes together could work is in Praetorium, where what you described does actually happen. I wish it were a feature, but it may be too much work with this much story now.

They intend to expand the trust system to older content. They may or may not manage to find the time but I think they want to when they can. It's a lot of work to manually adjust the trusts for each of the older dungeons, so I think they are looking at a more automated way to do it.

[Xeronia]

You can also just sync up a new game + file to your friend if you really want to play with them. Yes it isn't exactly perfect but given you have seen the story you could just skip cutscenes to catch up to wherever said friend is. You could also just make an alt if you wanted and keep it at pace with your friend (Which is what I personally do).

[Colt47]

They need a way to make sure the early game players can get a lot of access to the fun abilities, while still keeping it simple enough that they can learn it. That's been the issue since day 1. Poor players picking blackmage as their first job get stuck under-performing on DPS because the rotation keeps shifting with little input from the game.

[Bright-Flower]

They need a way to make sure the early game players can get a lot of access to the fun abilities, while still keeping it simple enough that they can learn it. That's been the issue since day 1. Poor players picking blackmage as their first job get stuck under-performing on DPS because the rotation keeps shifting with little input from the game.

Yeah I think some classes/jobs could do with a retooling of when they get certain things.

The game's longer GCD for me tends to be kind of mind numbing at lower levels when I only have a fraction of my job's total kit. I don't mind it aas much by level cap when there's more going on but it's always so boring getting lower level dungeons, depending on the job to what extent though.