Quote Originally Posted by Broken_Wind View Post
WoW used to have a leveling process that took a casual player several months.
It had great retention.
They instead made leveling super fast to funnel people to endgame faster, before they grew attached tot heir characters
It no longer has great retention.

Obviously, there are other factors at play in WoW, but in general games that take longer to get to 'endgame' have better retention

FFXIV is also the only MMORPG that i know of that has continued to grow for this long. Its only the second MMORPG to sustain 1mil subs

Maybe it is in spite of the MSQ process, or maybe its also because MSQ gets a lot of people more engaged with the game world and they stay longer

Its an indirect impact and we will never know the answer. Theyve worked to improve the process but its far from clear if making MSQ optional would be good or bad for the game. There are without question some players that it would attract. But would it be enough to overcome what it would lose in the long run? i don't know the answer to this, no one does. But if Im square enix I think twice about changing it.

That said, I think the duty support focus and the codex are signs they *maybe* are going to let people start at 7.0
I believe they did mention something along the lines of letting people start from the new arc by choice. Perhaps they might create a volume system of sorts where, when you begin, you can choose to open with Volume 1 or Volume 2, but when you start from Volume 2, you won't have access to HW, SB, ShB, or EW story content. Just the zones are open, but nothing else.