Quote Originally Posted by Veritas-Ancora View Post
I really don't know what they can do to offer a skip to 8.0 but it would be welcomed. I wouldn't mind if the level cap stayed at 100 and there was just a whole new story that you could play in 8.0 from L91 to L100.

Dawntrail really is the worst content they've ever put out and it's a shame. The FF9 references are mid at best for a game as good as FF9, and the story wasn't worth the trouble.

Dawntrail is a sore that will never go away, otherwise. People will have to play it to enjoy anything past it, and it's just going to be a really difficult slug to push through for all players current and years down the line. I see this killing a lot of subscriptions in the future.
At this point I think we need another ARR style catastrophe. Keep the existing expansions as NG+ options for people who want to experience those stories or revisit them (I love the story of 5.0 and 6.0 and don't want to see them disappear), but I feel we need another big calamity to wipe the slate clean and start a new story from there that goes from base to level cap. Quality of 2.0 and 7.0 being as unanimously bad as they are aside, the story is also getting too long for new players to want to sit through to play with their friends and as they keep adding expansions it's only going to get worse. Funneling everyone through to pay for a skip is a horrible fix for this as well, so eventually it's going to be the only real option if they want new players to stick around. Once we hit something like 10.0 it's going to be hundreds of hours of story content through dead empty zones with varying quality before you can reach endgame, that's a huge ask for any new player and even now it's pretty ridiculous.