I think they're finding a good middle-ground slowly but surely. You can smell the frustration behind the 2.0 storyline because they just didn't know how to pad it out enough to make leveling take a decent amount of time. It's what makes HW a lot more tolerable--they said fuck it and made leveling a lot quicker through the MSQ. I can understand their own frustration with wanting people to experience the entirety of the storyline standing at the crossroads of a lot of MMO players just wanting to see the newest toy.
Each individual story is mediocre at best and the true strength is in how the stories intertwine to make a compelling story and a fleshed out world. I'd want people to experience that too! I'll always agree that Verminion sucked, but at the same time I can appreciate them trying new things. PotD is one of those new and weird things and it's worked out really, really well. The new exploratory missions look rad too! Iteration is the backbone of game design and Yoshi-P does take player feedback into account and rarely pulls the, "Well, we know better!" angle that Blizzard often did/does.
PotD started as pretty barebones, and when players were forcefully wiping/leaving the instance because they designed it wrong by allowing people to do floors 40-50 without getting a single upgrade, they knew they'd f'd up. So that would fit more into the category of "started broken but became better". I think it's in a fairly good place right now, for what it's worth.
And I agree, they do seem to be learning from some mistakes. A fairly large one right now is that they still haven't balanced experience gains from 50-60 very well, as it's a total snore to level alt jobs to 60 through the big empty zones (remember when the explanation for the emptiness was that they were going to '
add things to it'?) and the roulette bonuses are way too small for something you can only do once a day. I still see people banging out FATES mindlessly for ~20-40k experience apiece when they need many millions of experience for their next level.
This will be something I'm sure they'll adjust going into Stormblood, and hopefully Stormblood FATES are tuned better than Heavensward's were (remember HW's FATES were giving less experience than Northern Thanalan FATES... leading everyone to completely ignore the starting areas in the expansion. Super dumb.)
Actually just bought the ARR and heavensward bundle yesterday on steam yesterday ($20) before all this stuff got announced as I've been meaning to try it for awhile. Iv never played an MMO before but love FF.
Why is everyone so eager to blow through ARR and heavensward stuff just to get to stormblood? I would think I'd wanna get my money's worth and I thought this is supposed to have a good story?
Imagine FFXV if the main story quests were interspersed with finding Takka more beans. That's basically FFXIV's MSQ up until 50, where the production values go way up, except there's over a hundred quests to do in succession, and these quests are mostly "teleport here, click on this person, teleport back". It's a huge hurdle and time investment that made sense when people were getting hours of enjoyment out of it every few months after being content starved, but to arrive late to the party, it seems neverending. Add to that, there are very few meaningful rewards because they're meant for level 50 characters and they don't want you to be too far beyond 50 when you start Heavensward, so you're basically stuck at level 50 for a hundred quests before you can move on. It's just not super well thought through.
FFXIV isn't about a rush to reach the max level, it's about the story and dungeons and boss fights and stuff that happens as you progress through the game, and more than half of that is happening as you level.
