The story is great, but it blatantly gets in the way of the rest of the game

[Tychonius]

So, I've been playing this game for the last two weeks about. I've owned it for longer than that, but never really got into it until some friends told me they were really enjoying it so I resubscribed and gave it another shot.

For the most part I've been having a lot of fun, but I have run into a problem that really annoys me: The way the main quest gates access to the expansions makes your progress grind to a complete halt in an obnoxious way at several points of the game.

For example, the ARR storyline has 80 (!!!) quests in a row at the end of it that are all level 50. I understand that this made sense when these quests were released episodically with game updates when the max level was 50, but from the perspective of a new player it's absolutely ridiculous.

You can't make any real progress on any classes you have at 50 with those quests.

You can't use the quests to level other classes up to level 50 either, because they are too low level to do them.

The only thing you can do is just accept the fact that the game randomly completely stalls out your progress until you've completed the quest chain.

The same thing happens at level 60, 70 and 80 again.

This is honestly the only thing in this game for me so far that has stuck out as a genuinely negative experience.

I enjoy the story, but I also enjoy leveling up and exploring other aspects of the game. I want to get to the content my friends are playing. Suddenly the story goes from being something I was enjoying at my own pace to something that is blatantly getting in the way of me accessing the other content. It takes a lot of the fun out of of the story when you feel pressured to just grind through it to be allowed to access the rest of the game.