Final Fantasy XIV is my home now and I want to give some ideas on how to prevent new players from boosting themselves and ruining the experience of the game.
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I'd say the best way to keep new players engaged would be to trim up some more problematic quest chains in the early game. Let us also use higher level skills in synced dungeons as well as another "carrot" to tease them with. Possibly rework some of the rarly dungeons as well. Would only really need to touch up and trim down as far as titan as the pacing tends to even out after the titan fight.
Could even trim down the "banquet" quests before titan down into a single humorous cutscene. I don't remember any particularly important details that came to light there.
The community is not wrong by saying "It gets better", but the extent to which they repeat this does create a paradox in player expectations. The later story and content is so good WHEN the player has taken the time to slow down and really enjoy what the early game is setting up. They can't continually hype "Content B that comes after Content A is so much better" and not expect some percentage of players to feel compelled to skip Content A.
I joined right before they cleaned up the ARR quest line so i understand why folks think its slow, but at the same time I have to point out that it was so much worse not that long ago. Unless they remake the entire base game for a third time, its not going to change much anymore.
That being said I know I am a bit biased. I'm all for a slower paced game that focuses on story so when I picked it up I was super on board (for the most part. I hated having to go back to the Waking Sands every other quest. Bad enough that I actually hated and still hate Minfilia with a burning passion. )
Its unfortunate, but I don't think there is much they can do beyond remaking it which is unrealistic to expect the company to do a third time.
imagine paying money to buy a game, then paying more money to not play it……………….
i have my cousins playing in JP datacenters so I make an alt and boost that character.
I've rarely played mmos in the past. UO and ESO and I usually avoid stores in general so I can't say much about boosting.
I would agree with everything outside of two things:
1) A REALM REBORN Beginning is a Masterpiece. Skewed perception of people that don't care about slow build ups, and want to rush to endgame don't matter.
They must either change their ways from what they know, or this game is not for them.
2) Boosts were SO bad for this game, because they are antithetical to the meat of the game, which is the slow build up to the masterpiece payoffs.
BUT!! Now that we have NG+ (another unique feature in the World of MMORPGs this amazing game introduced), it is a zero issue, since they can experience everything afterhand.
PS: Stop saying to rewrite the masterpiece that is A REALM REBORN.
If someone boosts, doesn't even use NG+ and want to rush and experience ENDWALKER for example with their friends, and don't have a good time because if this, this game is NOT for them.
WOW mentality does not fly with FINAL FANTASY XIV.
And FINAL FANTASY XIV does NOT need to cater to the average Gamer that does not have the attention span to experience this game.
Also, this notion that somehow A REALM REBORN is a slog, is a made up notion introduced by content creators in 2016 (before STORMBLOOD release) and echoed by veterans of the time, pre poisoning the opinions of all new players since.
MILLIONS of people that played this game before this made up notion and many that didn't know about that made up notion, LOVED A REALM REBORN.
This is a fact. If it wasn't FINAL FANTASY XIV would not exist after the garbage that 1.0 was, and HEAVENSWARD onward would not exist.
But somehow, millions of people played through A REALM REBORN, and that is back before 2016 when it was CONSIDERABLY worse than now.
I have a question for you. Do you factor facts like GOLD SAUCER and Hunts, etc as A REALM REBORN features?
Because if not, I am sorry to disappoint you, but they are.
Food for thought.
I just want them to re dub ARR with new VAs. The old ARR VAs are freaking rough.
Kinda related but I have had exactly 2 run ins with people that have boosted, both of them died a lot and didn't know to not be in the orange, soo the both of them were pretty bad. I'm not saying you shouldn't boost, but at least learn how to play the game
The ARR story is amazing and I discourage anyone from wanting to skip past it. And this is also not a shaming message for those who ultimately choose to skip. I'm not a story purist and if the story isnt your cup of tea then that's totally fine too. I'm just here to discourage from skipping moments that you MAY be your cup of tea. Ultimately, however you choose to play is up to you.
To be fair, most of the community dont really care if anyone boosts, the only issue is when said booster complains about the game; good example of this is Quin69. There are some people that really just want to do end game raids ( mostly people like the world first people) but they take the time to learn the mechanics and how the job/classes play, and it seems like they are enjoying themselves.
They've already trimmed ARR, with patch 5.3, they removed about 16% of the quests, went from 345 to 290
This topic has been pretty common in my FC lately, which is made up half of people who have been playing since ARR was released like myself and people who have been playing, at the most, the past six months. And I try not to say "it gets better" and more to say "this game is about the journey, rushing to the end really robs you of what makes this game special." It's a lot more wordy, I know, but it's more accurate I think.
I think your take on boosting is about a month stale. At this point, let the new players boost so they can enjoy Endwalker with their friends as it unfolds. There simply isn’t time to run through all of the prequels before EW drops. Even boosted, they can enjoy the story they skip at any time in the future when they have time to do so without sacrificing their involvement in the hype of a new expansion.
Do not shame people who choose to play in a way that works best for their situation. Your analogy to a yokel shooting themselves in the foot comes off as highly arrogant and anti-social.
Let people play how they choose, and make whatever tradeoffs make sense for their own situations. Worst case scenario, their boosting money helps improve the game you love playing.
Unfortunately it's 2021, we live in world where everything is about rushing to the end of games and flexing your progress online over others. Even if FF14's culture is different, it won't change the overall MMO culture, where almost everything has a real world price tag on it similar to mobile games, boosting and real money trading is accepted by playerbases, even endorsed by Blizzard lead developer himself. This is then even more compounded by the MMO genre being a "30 year old boomer" genre in the West, where majority of players are older, have a lot of disposable income from working but are time poor for their entertainment. Thus they want to still feel like they were the hardcore raiders of their teenage years and are willing to pay to skip to the endgame and necessary grinds to not feel left behind, regardless of the ethics or necessity.
I don't know if it was because FFXIV was the first proper MMO I ever started playing (played mostly single player JRPGs), but when I first got to ARR, I didn't feel it was slow or a slog. I actually hesitated going too fast in the story because I was afraid I'd ran out of it (I started when HW was the only expansion). xD;
I've levelled alts, so I can now see some of the pre-2.55 patches being annoying, but I don't think it's slow in general. It's takes as much time as it needs to build the world and characters. I've always gotten bored of games that rush story so much and don't elaborate on what characters are and feel and what are the rules of the world, that I end up not feeling any connection with it
And on boosting, I agree it should only be an option if you have played the MSQ on your main character, but I know many disagree. I've boosted some portions of the story and a job on an alt because I had experinced it multiple times and played the job I boosted on my main
These is my highly biased opinions though
FOMO is not really a thing with this game. There are very large communities on each data center that are dedicated to running old content. I know somebody who's going through everything including savage raids (excluding ultimates) patch by patch, she's still on the free trial in HW, with about 700 hours played.
One of the best parts about this game is that there is NO rush. You can experience all content (with some minor exceptions) whenever you want. That includes the story. Any FOMO people are experiencing is only in their head, they're not actually missing out on anything, and there is no need to rush through content in order to catch up.
FF14 has 4 end games, at the end of ARR and each expansion. It's so much different to WoW in that sense. Of course you can play all of it at max level, but there's something to be said about experiencing it in order and in context.
My biggest concern with new players will they accept the sexy and mighty warrior god warrior job.
I personally agree that boosts should only be something you can do once you've gotten a character to the end of the game without one. That said, at the end of the day, it's each person's decision, money, and time they're spending. Some people just don't care about the story. Having no context doesn't matter to them because they don't care. And if they do end up deciding that they care, new game+ exists now to help with that.
When it comes to new players and their perception, I really dislike this whole narrative that people push that "ARR is bad, it gets better in the expansions, so just tough it out". It colors peoples' perception before they even have a chance to form their own opinion. When people say stuff like that, they're telling new players that it's objectively bad and that they WILL dislike it, which is not true at all. Whether or not someone enjoys ARR is purely up to them and their tastes. People have this idea that just because they felt like ARR was a slog, that everyone else will feel the same as them.
Personally, when it comes to games I have learned to not always take the general consensus as gospel, so despite hearing people say that it's a slog and all that, I went in with no real big expectations and just let the game speak for itself. And I thoroughly enjoyed ARR. I didn't think it was a masterpiece by any means, but for the base story of a game like this, it was servicable with good character and world building, and was structured well to have a good payoff at the end. And my appreciation and opinion of it has only gotten higher since seeing the expansions and all the things that they built in ARR pay off even all the way to the end of Shadowbringers.
For some people, the slow burn isn't for them and that's okay. Not every game is for everyone. I will always encourage people to give the story a try and not let other peoples' opinions decide to boost for them before they've even started to form their own opinion. There are absolutely people who come from other mmos (especially WoW) who have certain expectations and they think that they'll play FF14 the exact same way they play WoW and that the story is not important so they'll skip through it. They don't expect an mmo to have a good story. They don't think it's worth caring about. But a lot of people who give it a chance end up realizing that it is worth paying attention to. This is a game where the journey has just as much if not more meaning than the destination, which is something that people are not used to coming from WoW.
I don't think it's so reliant on the community saying "it gets better". It's up to the player to decide if they're going to take the time to appreciate the journey or not. Nobody can make someone do that. They have to decide for themselves. If someone has doubts, I would not say "it gets better". I would tell them that the game's story is very much constructed like any of the single player FF games, and to treat it as such. And that they don't need to worry about getting to the end within a certain time frame. The content isn't going anywhere. The game is designed so that you're not going to miss out just because you're behind everyone else who's at the end. I've seen people who literally look up a quest list for the msq and say stuff like "oh only X more quests until I get to Y" and it kind of feels bad seeing that. It's like them watching a pot of water waiting for it to boil. There is no need to worry about stuff like that. It takes you out of the immersion. If people just pay attention to the story and enjoy the ride, they'll be through it before they know it.
In an interview w/ Yoshi-P at the media tour, they said they wanted to take another look at ARR. While they are proud of ARR, they acknowledge it was rushed and not as rich as later expansions. He implied that pacing would be looked at, and maybe some of the instance designs. This may tie back to the expansion to the trust system they're making.
I'm going to be perfectly blunt with you. This isn't a new problem. At all.
And you're preaching to the fucking choir, new kid.
But, hey, that's why they've extended the free trial (with no restrictions on play time) up through Heavensward.
Was this brought on by the sale? Because they do this sale every year. They've HAD boosts for ages.
There HAVE BEEN people who skipped all the story. There WILL BE people who skip the story but enjoy the raids anyway. It has been like this for y e a r s. It is not a new problem. It tends to resolve itself on its own, because some people do go back via New Game+ or they'll make an alt to experience the story or they think 'hey, this game isn't for me I can't believe I spent money on it, cancelling my sub now' and all of that is a-okay.
Now if they go onto Reddit and start bitching about their experience well… They've made their choice. ಠ◡ಠ Get their ass!
My two cents as a WoW Refugee who recently reached the Endwalker Waiting Room….
ARR was good, you just have to focus on the story as a priority, gameplay will fall in on its own. It's a new universe with new jargons to understand and political complexities to wrap your head around. I think it's the previous conditioning from playing WoW for so many years that made it unenjoyable for me at first.
As a refugee sprout there's definitely a lot of WoW Brain to detox. The first hardest one for me was to "just focus on the MSQ!"… I think I cleared out the whole of Gridania of early level side quests before I burnt out and decided to 'just do the MSQ' and started finally enjoying myself a bit more.
Oh and reading the god damn texts, instead of just accepting a wall of text and focusing on a list of objectives later. That took me a while as well.
TLDR: Go into it without preconceptions on how an MMO should be, and treat it as a brand new game you're learning from scratch. It only gets better after that (ARR included) 🙂