FF14 player count reached the lowest point in 4 years. We lost 75% of the playerbase.

[Yeonhee]

It's a foreign concept for most. Helping your new friend? Hah. Syncing down to do content with them? Hah. Making a new character to go alongside them? Pfft. It's not that complicated. Why are people trying to implement skipping the whole game??

Did we play the same game ? If I want to help my newbie friend, the only thing I can do is wait 10 hours for them to read their visual novel up to the point that they get a dungeon or a trial unlocked. Then do it again until the next after we finished this 15 minutes piece of actual gameplay.

Even without that, the game's biggest issue for new player is ARR's story is vastly uninteresting as well as being long as hell. You have to suffer through dozens of hours of bad story only for it to start getting better at Heavensward. And even then, the structure of the MSQ is very, VERY bad. There's pretty much no interactivity with anything outside dungeons and trials, that's just an enormous visual novel but without any choice to make.

And frankly, there's no reason for content like raid and such to not be available to everyone when they have the level to do so while also advancing the story on the side. There are people who do love endgame stuff and having to go through a 300 hours of "go there and watch this cutscene" to get the right to participate in those is just garbage design nowaday.