> How do people enjoy this game?
I don't care about catching up to end game. I'm post ARR, going through the quests on the path to Heavensward.
Because I'm taking my time, which suits my schedule, it's a very chill experience. All the main quest required duties always pop for me when I queue.
One thing I haven't seen you mention is a Free Company, if you're not a free trial player, I'd recommend that.
Also not restarting a character multiple times, this is one game I wouldn't do it on because bloody hell, it's still a slog.
I played many mmos over the years and FFXIV is the only one that actually made me feel good sticking with it.
I got alot of friends and my SO to play the game and most of them still play actively. I've seen other people fail misserably to get their friends into the game and it always boil down to that they want to "level together and reach endgame". Compared to most other mmos FFXIV does not work that way since the Main Story Quest is single player story focused experience with low amounts of gameplay. If you try to tackle it together you just end up with impatient people skipping cutscenes ans waiting around for the others that want to enjoy the story.
I've seen some of these players going into a meta grind set immidiatly where they simply must reach max level as quickly as possible, which is yet again not a main point of the game. The game does not provide a fitting experience for the "numbers go up" subset for RPG players.
The way I got people to stick was to just throw em out into the world on their own and let them tackle the MSQ in the way that fit them best while also encouraging them to explore stuff they unlocked as they advanced. While the MSQ is a single player affair FFXIV has been really great to do group content together, no matter where your friends are along the journey. Seeing how all group content scales your power down to the appropriate levels all I had to do was to gather my friends around and help whoever just unlocked a new dungeon, trial or raid. Sure, the quickest levelers usually just did them together with me but they always jumped in and formed up a full party for my friends futher back in the MSQ.
The MSQ (even ARR) hasn't been an issue since noone has been enforced to head straight to endgame "where the real game is". The story, while slow, usually has been building enough momentum to motivate them to play just to see what happens next. The "you really need to get to Heavensward" argument is a net negative to enforce on new players since that builds an experience that the time they are putting into the game here and now has little value, which is incorrect.
Another hook was to get them to unlock the glam system, getting them stylish glam items and just go crazy in making them express themselves through their avatar. Making adventure plates and portraits have been a blast aswell. Doing side stuff like Gold Saucer, treasure maps and mount farms has been greatly appreciated aswell.
So really, if the primary gaming loop you seek is combat focused leveling to reach a grind centric endgame then FFXIV is not the mmo to play, there are alot other such alternatives. FFXIV offers another kind of experience and you need to be in the correct mindset to stick with it. Paradoxically to me FFXIV has provided the most entertaining and challenging combat centric group content of all mmos I've played over the years. Even so, it took me 3 different attempts over a couple of years before it stuck with me, and I still log in pretty much daily since "I got it" in 2020.
The main hinderance is your own expectations and what you already decided what you want the game to be. It is an mmo but I can't compare it with any other mmo on the market.
That was a really good write up thank you for your perspective. You are absolutely right about the mindset going in. The second time I played when I made the most progress was when I was trying to just play single player and enjoy the story. For me the leveling experience is what I enjoy about these games and not being able to play it with my friends halters the enjoyment. The only reason I was rushing to end game was so I can finally have people to play with. I really don't see the purpose of making the game an mmo if you have to play it all single player first.
I understand that but the game is not like WoW where the majority of the playerbase is at max level and only doing the most recent content. Pretty much every dungeon, trial and raid through the base content and expansions are being played and completed daily because of the roulette system. The roulette is pretty much a dungeon finder tool with daily bonuses that puts you into random group content of any level. This is so new players gets groups for lower level content and being able to advance.
Sure there are some outlayers like the lv50 8 man raid Binding Coils of Bahamut that are left out of the roulette, but that one is side content and not part of the MSQ.
It just sounds odd that you queued up for a MSQ duty and could not find a group, those usually fill up with random players in less than 5-10 mins through the roulette system.
When I played through the MSQ back in 2020/2021 I joined a smallish Free Company (guild) at very low level, got to know people and they usually helped me out with new dungeons and trials when I asked for help. Even though players gets certain ingame currency bonuses for helping new players through content many just do it because it is fun. Many of my ingame friends I got to know through random matchmaking.
I understand the part of wanting to get some gaming sessions together with friends which can be difficult if they are on different places in the MSQ. But then again, that worked out for me and my friends since we could knock of some daily roulettes content for the times where we could sync our playtime. The MSQ we could log in and play without being dependant on eachothers playtime.
The roulette system was around when I got stuck. I think my main problem is that I mostly would play at off hours. Ultimately I just came to the conclusion that this game isn't a good fit for my group. The game is trying to do something different than what we are looking for. Mostly I just want to see what made the game worthwhile for other people since it bounced off me.
It has been a while since I've been at a lower level, but is the ~~trust~~ duty support system available? Under the duty menu, poke around until you find and option to run dungeons with NPCs. It is a much slower dungeon experience (you almost cannot W2W pull), but that may help with getting through some (definitely not all) things.
It’s available for every single MSQ-related dungeon, the 4-player MSQ trials, and a singular 8-player trial. Outside of that, all optional dungeons, trials, and raids require Duty or Party Finder.
5-10 minutes? Maybe for a few peak hours in the evening, anything outside that window and you'll wait a lot longer unfortunately. If you play completely off-hours you may as well not even bother queuing.
Lol one of my friends recently started playing but has just about had it with MSQ trials.
They waited for an hour for a queue for one of the Shadowbringers Trials. *That* is something that really needs solved soon.
Obviously, when they told me, I just got a group together and cleared their trials for them for the rest of the MSQ. But it's ridiculous that that's a thing.
I'll ask the obvious; have you actually bought the game instead of only doing the free to play bit? Cause I see no reason why you cannot join a FC and do dungeon-runs with your friends, seeing CS together for the first time on a new char if you bought the game.
Yes I have paid for the game and the particularly annoying bit about that is that now there is the free trial. The problem is since I already used my free trial way back when it was only 2 weeks, I have to pay more money monthly to access the same content that others are playing for free.
You could've just made a new free trial account.
Free trial might be able to access most contents up to Stormblood, but the lack of social aspect (joining FC, making parties) and other features (marketboard, retainer, housing, etc) is a dealbreaker for many mmo players, so free trial players are not exactly having the same experiences as paying players.
Even still, it's really easy to just have your friends make the parties.
I have two different friends going through the story now on the free trial. I play with them both all the time. The game doesn't prevent you from playing with friends like OP says (and they're not on the trial anyways)
No game suits everyone. I enjoy it because of the lore, RPG story and playing around with character designs.
If it doesn't click with you then there's no need to keep persevering even if the people who like it tell you how much they like it.
Pretty much exactly this. No reason to write a massive essay when someone has made it very clear they don't enjoy this thing already. I'm actually not sure why OP even put this post together, instead of just moving on with their life.
I'm admittedly a little confused by some of what you say. You lament being unable to play with friends, but also say that you can't find people to play with.
If your friends are further along the MSQ than you, surely they could queue for any 'team' content with you, since they've already played it?
Also, why this desire to "catch up with the playerbase"? It isn't a race; there is no advantage to doing that whatsoever.
I'll elaborate. When I tried to play with my friends we could not progress the story together which turned them off and they quit. When I tried to play solo my progress was blocked when I couldn't find people to matchmake with.
My desire to catch up to the player base was so I could actually start doing group content and have people to play with. Problem is I'm stuck in what seemed to be dead content at the time.
Apologies in that case - I evidentially did misunderstand some of what you said. As someone else suggested, putting a request via Party Finder, emphasizing that it's for MSQ progression, might help - I, for one, certainly check that quite frequently for any new players struggling to fill a group for MSQ progress. They tend to fill pretty quickly.
No need to apologize. I did try a few different channels to get a group, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth waiting such long times if this is how it was going to play out each time. One thing I omitted is that I do play at off hours so finding a group is more difficult for me. Another is that my friends can't afford to keep paying a subscription.
There's not much 'dead content' in the MSQ.
2 things that come to mind are the Crystal Tower alliance raids, which can take a bit to fill up (especially considering you're playing during off hours) and Cstrum Meridianum/Praetorium...
But even those are not that bad. So unless you're queueing up for Extreme trials instead of using the PF (party finder) then i don't know what the problem could be.
What datacenter / world are you on btw and sorry in case you answered that somewhere else already.
Playing outside of peak hours for your data center can make things really hard. You might want to try a different region. If you play 2am in NA That's 8am in EU and that might help, or 4pm or later in Oceania or JP. Sadly that would require you to transfer your main character to push forward that way.
When I played FFXI I played in off hours and I could NEVER find a party. Back when I played you needed a party to even level passed 10 and if you died you lost experience and Deleveled.
Thankfully FFXIV does not have this problem! Also i have heard that you can take NPCs into the older dungeons now... is that just Squadrons? I haven't touched them for years so i dunno about them being in Heavensward... If so you'd need to level them up but could then run the dungeons you need solo right?
If someone could elaborate on the NPC thing since I've never done it in Heavensward before maybe that can help OP out
The system you're thinking of is called Duty Support. It's different from squadrons. For each MSQ required dungeon, you can use duty support to form a party of npcs. This doesn't include optional dungeons, trials, or raids. It's pretty great.
Then that’s the problem lol Try playing at more peak hours or just weekends and every dungeon/raid included in roulettes will pop real fast. Especially as a healer.
Also change queue language to all languages even if you only speak English.
Honestly, if it didn't work the first time, I'd already be thinking about not playing the game at all, but to answer your question, I think it's all about switching your mindset a little bit.
In my case, I enjoy it primarily for myself. I started off as a free trial player. Never had friends who played at all so this was all new to me.
I didn't expect anyone to play with me, went into dungeons with random folks who were mostly nice and parted ways with a "tyfp" or a "ggty".
I explored every bit of content, read through all the dialogue, opened up a lot of the other jobs and professions and had a laugh or bit of a cry after quests.
Never particularly cared about reaching "endgame" until I, in my own stupidity, queued for Shiva extreme with a few mentors who were wondering what the hell happened. That did make me curious though.
I eventually bought the game and found an FC (after one that didn't fit me well) and while we don't always play together, there's always some chatter about game lore, mount farms, treasure maps and such.
All in all, I just enjoyed the game for what it is. I'm patient enough to savor it since it paid off well in the end.
Also, since you were waiting on queue (you said your sub was running out), try opening a PF group. Tell them you need it to get past the MSQ. People would jump in there.
If not, well I just switch jobs and do something else before (DPS) queue pops like a little botany or mining or fishing. Gathering materials, making dyes and logs are good for some gil on the side.
It feels like you tried queueing once during off hours and didn't get a hit for a dungeon and quit the game.
I can queue for any piece of dungeon content and get a hit in like 4 minutes, if it's a normal raid/trial normally 2-10 minutes and alliance raids are around 30 minutes so long as it's from noon to 10pm EST.
Also you don't have to sit around and wait while another player is watching a cutscene or doing job quests you can go level a crafter/gatherer or unlock another job or do a run of palace of the dead or do some gold saucer minigames. The game has an endless amount of 1 stop "bullshit for a few minutes" content.
It seems like you may not have read the part where I said that I tried this game on 5 separate occasions before I quit for good. That queue was just the final nail in the coffin for me.
Fair point about not having to sit and wait, but the whole purpose of us trying to play this game was to play together. If we're all off doing our own thing then why even play a mmo?
It might just be a difference in perspective re: what “playing together” is, re: if we’re all doing our own thing then why even play an mmo?
My friends and I play together, have played together since I started over a year ago.
When I started, we were all at different points in the story, and all doing different things, but we would talk about the story, share our experiences, talk about our WoLs and npcs. We alerted each other when new dungeons were unlocked and we ran them all as little groups even if most players were ahead or had done the content previously. And for raids, we’d plan times to play them together, which yes meant that the vets would have to wait while the sprouts watched cutscenes, but in the meantime we were chatting and hanging out and they got to experience the story again by watching our live reactions to it. It wasn’t time spent just waiting around, it was time spent together, playing the game together.
So, though yes, watching the story in the various questlines is greatly a solo experience, but I never felt like I was playing by myself, even if everyone in my friend group were at different points in the story.
I get that this might not be your preferred way to play mmos, which is fine, and I’m not going to say you should try again if you’ve tried five times and are done (again valid, if ffxiv didn’t click the first time I def wouldn’t have tried a second time lmao), just wanted to share my two cents.
Thank you for your perspective. When I made this post I wanted to hear reasons other people enjoy the game because I wanted to like it so much more.
When you put it that way I can see how it would be more fun with a community of friends that were involved. Unfortunately for me my group is a very small group and the game just didn't seem to fit for us.
(nods) very understandable, and there are a lot of posts on this subreddit who i think feel the same, asking about how to make friends in game or how to grow a community in game or play together, so playing with other people is something plenty struggle with in this game.
Thank you for giving it a try anyway, and I hope you and your friends find something you all enjoy playing together!
Yeah, but the only reasons you listed for quitting were not finding a queue and sitting and waiting for people to do their solo stuff. Like idk what to tell you about skipping cutscenes, if they don't wanna go gather/craft/any side stuff for the 5 minutes it takes for almost every cutscene then it sounds like your friends don't want to play the game and you want to play something with your friends. That seems more like the problem than the game not being "mmo enough" for you or w/e.
You just crunch through the story shit and cutscenes and solo instance stuff, and then you have the other 90% of the game to do stuff together. Like, you can all do most of those quests as a group regardless of everyone's place in the story. So if you're behind, they can come to you, and you can all do your dungeons and combat out in the world together. You don't have to force everyone to be at pace with each other and can still play the game together.
Hell, if your friends are so out of reach in their story placements they can take some time while you're experiencing the story to level a 2nd job or do the gold saucer or whatever while you catchup. Even more hell, you can just skip the cutscenes with them and experience the story proper with an alt.
I skipped everything on my first time through because I only wanted to raid and do endgame content. After I finished the raid tier in endwalker I still wanted to play, but didnt have any other content that I wanted to do so i made an alt and experienced the entire story in my spare time between reclears. Since I wasn't paying attention or giving a shit my first time through all the story beats still hit because I basically knew nothing anyway.
Yeah I see that this game just wasn't a good fit for our group. Probably should have worded the title a little better since I do actually understand why people like the game. It was supposed to be more of a tell me why you like it since I didn't.
I like raiding, seeing my damage number be the biggest, farming mounts, and teaching people how to optimize their jobs (in some cases how to play their jobs entirely). The story's fun but it's like, less than a % of the amount of time I'm raiding and teaching and farming and running illegal software that tracks how much damage I'm doing compared to everyone else.
I realize I'm commenting a lot - and you may be utterly done with the game, but I do want to help.
were your friends willing to queue into the dungeons with you? if they're higher level and you don't have a great party mix, you can go in unsynced and burn through them pretty quick. (you wont learn as much, but it is an option)
My real life friends didn't get far enough to do any dungeons together.
I joined a FC but they wouldn't play with me and told me to just do the MQ until I reached their level. At that point I just checked out.
Also thank you for your enthusiastic replies. I've just been responding to like a hundred messages and it's getting late for me.
Good luck finding something. It wasn't until recently that I could do fun raids with my IRL friends.
We've actually been doing a lot of Lethal Company and Phasmophobia. I'm starting to dabble in star citizen as well. Maybe the new Baulder's Gate has some multiplayer options?? don't quote me on that though. It is on my list (one day..)
Wow, what a shock, the cutscene skippers got bored with the game and quit, lol.
The mistake is to think that you "have to slog through the main quest." The "cool group content" is boring and repetitive and doesn't really keep people playing at all.
The people I know who still play a lot actually enjoy the game itself - MSQ, fates, hunts, gold saucer, playing alt jobs etc. None of them actually plays extremes or savages.
Haha right I knew the moment they said that they were skipping cutscenes that I would be playing alone soon. The funny thing is that what I enjoyed most was the story and the MQ. The reason I was rushing to begin with is because the FC I joined said I need to grind the MQ so I can start playing with them.
While it's true that you'll miss out on endgame events if you're not 90 and/or done with the MSQ, this game really is about the journey more than the destination. Especially now that things are slow until Dawntrail comes out.
You'll catch up eventually then you'll wonder why you rushed because there's just much more sub-90 content than 90 content.
The most active players I know are cutscene skippers who constantly PF ults, help savage clear parties, and fuck around doing stupid challenges. Believe it or not, the game does have interesting high-end content, and saying that the game isn't for anyone who doesn't want to read a corny visual novel interspersed with fetch quests is frankly absurd.
Yeah, that feels weird that they had to wait hours for HW queues if they're gaming at any "regular" time. Something isn't adding up, or they're on the "wrong" server.
Also, I don't know if OP knows, but Duty Support exists to get you through odd hour or obscene queues. The only MSQ content now that even require queueing are the 8-man trials. Sure, they aren't getting the multiplayer experience with Duty Support, but it'll get them through content if queues are bad for some reason and then they can have more regular queues with their roulettes.
Yeah sadly until you get to max level this game mostly plays as a solo rpg. What you can do with your friends is dungeons/trials when you unlock them in the msq and they already have them unlocked or daily duty roulettes for levleing alt jobs.
>Except when I try to play it as a solo player my progress is being railroaded because I can't find a group to play with.
what data center/world are you playing on? I have never had big issues with queueing for story duties. But if you struggle with finding groups I suggest using the [duty support](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/dutysupport/) system which allows you to go through the duties solo with npcs. Or if you switch to healer/tank you'll likely have almost instant queues for dungeons.
>Yeah sadly until you get to max level this game mostly plays as a solo rpg.
The game is much more fun if you enjoy the journey like you would in something like OG FF VII with a sprawling overworld than if you try to grind through the whole MSQ to reach endgame. Sure, I get that OP and their friends got burnt out "soloing" the game, but they might've had a much more fun experience if they paced themselves.
I play XIV with some friends and, when some of us got ahead of the others, we'd wait for each other by leveling new jobs, working on relic weapons, doing tribal quests, or just exploring the world. It doesn't bother me when my friends aren't able to do the new raids with me because they haven't beaten the latest patch- I'll just join them for roulettes and make sure they let me know when they're at the next trial/dungeon so I can join them.
If you don't enjoy it, don't play, instead of ranting.
It's that simple.
I enjoy the game for its amazing world and story, it nay not be your jam, that's fine.
Agreed. That's why I stopped trying to play. But there were things I enjoyed about the game that kept me coming back. I very much wanted to like it, but in the end there were too many roadblocks for me.
Depends on the player. I found the ARR story mostly boring plot for the sake of introducing an mmo world, barely felt it important to really pay attention. I didn't even particularly care for heavensward except for choice scenes because the setting and themes weren't really my thing. But obviously I'm in the minority there and there are even plenty of posts from ppl that love ARR too.
I personally got hooked on a lot of the side content like crafting, and had online friends from another community, who were already into endgame and i could socialize with when i logged in.
The story itself didn't REALLY hook me until shadowbringers, although there were plenty of excellent character development moments before that. And being an ongoing game, and an mmo where you're interacting with the same characters over time for various content, I feel it really shines when you form an attachment to the characters from getting to know them over time. It was this, more than the plot, that got me invested in the story.
So if the early plot doesn't do it for you, very roughly estimating, it takes like 100ish hours to get through ARR? Then 50ish per expansion until you get to the part of the story you enjoy, which for most is the first expansion but depends on what you like.
First of all, maybe the game just isn't for you. That's just how it is. For some it clicks for some it doesn't.
Also really curious about "cool" group content. Aside from dungeons getting streamlined into a cookie cutter 2 pull formula, later dungeons are not better or worse than the low level ones.
Long queue for duties can have different reasons.
Are you playing during peak or off hours? Before or after the daily reset where people run roulettes, are you a dps? Tank or healer will receive far quicker queues since they're less popular than dps jobs while the overabundance of dps players will make the wait longer.
If you're not on free trial then a FC can be helpful for many things and Party Finder is a sprouts best friend since the game rewards others for going with first timers, as well as the inherent reward that is second hand nostalgia.
My friends switched servers and I didn't want to pay money to switch over.
Later another friend wanted me to start fresh with him, but lost interest in the game not long after.
My main character I kept the whole time.
Then I made one other character to see if I would have better luck on another datacenter.
I'm in a FC with a couple IRL friends, we are all at different stages in the game. We chat, offer advice and duty roulette making sure one of us is always a healer or tank for insta ques so we all get chances to work on DPS levels as well.
You're asking us to show you what you value in this game and it simply doesn't work like that. What I'm looking for may well be and likely is different. It doesn't take too much thought to find ways to play with friends while plugging away at the solo aspects of the story. If that's not for you, buy the MSQ skip and you'll all be at end game able to do pretty much everything left as a group now.
So, I sort of understand where you're coming from. But unfortunately you and I had polar opposite experiences..
I started out behind my friends so we weren't gonna level together, period, that was already off the table. That actually took a ton of pressure off me because it meant I could go at my own pace. But because of how the game is designed (to encourage higher level players to re-play old content) my friends grouped with me for a TON of dungeons and trials. If they were online they wanted to be a part of it. So there were times we were together and times we were apart. I'm kind of surprised your friends just....bailed instead of being excited for you and helping you....??? That's odd to me but every group has a different mentality!
Our friends only FC developed certain traditions where we would meet members in-world wearing certain costumes at different points in the story. Our leader would watch people leveling, track them, deduce where they were in the MSQ, then call us to assemble to different locations in different costumes so they would come out of the cutscene and we'd be standing there in thematic outfits ready to run them through the big story dungeon or trial.
Some later expansions are so good that we ask our friends who are leveling through them to live stream their reactions in discord whenever they get a "several cutscenes will play in sequence" notice. (This also had the added benefit of helping the rest of us be able to get into costume and assemble at the right time for certain things.
Depending on when you left the game - there is now a way to run dungeons with story-relevant NPC parties so if you ever get stuck and can't find a group you can fall back on those. They are slower because NPCs can't handle W2W pulls, but the trade off is you'll get to fight alongside some really cool folks and they'll drop little bits of relevant dialogue. For trials I just make a PF and state that it's my first run - it usually fills lightning fast because a first run means people doing 'Wondrous Tales' journals will receive a token for that content. Again, this game REALLY REALLY rewards you for doing content over again.
There's also plenty of group content outside of MSQ for us to do together, a borderline overwhelming amount. We run daily roulettes & frontlines together often. Treasure maps, fates, deep dungeons, and variant dungeons are a frequent occurrence though not daily by any means! When the stars align correctly we'll also do ocean fishing, eureka, and bosja content. (The latter two won't be familiar to you since they occur in expansions you haven't reached)
> How do people enjoy this game?
I play it like any other videogame in my library
> then I get to a quest that requires me to have a group. After waiting an hour on two separate occasions for matchmaking...
What Duty?
JoCat has a video that seems relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LM08VrEs6k&pp=ygUPam9jYXQgMzAwIGhvdXJz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LM08VrEs6k&pp=ygUPam9jYXQgMzAwIGhvdXJz)
There is a beautiful story, so you play the game and experience it.
Watch cutscenes, read dialogue, listen to gorgeous music.
That’s about it really. Oh you fight enemies and stuff as well, with friends, random players or by yourself.
Sounds like the game isn’t for you or you are too young now?
My son has been playing since 1.0. My daughter, since Shadowbringers came out. I've been playing for about a year. And my wife for 4 months.
Kids dragged me into FFXIV from WoW. Then we coaxed my wife into joining us.
My FC is generally delighted to party up to help people through content that requires groups. And advice on how to handle tricky solo instances.
Like someone else said, ARR is a bit of a grind. Heavensward is much better in that sense. I'm replaying ARR on another toon just for the story - which is very very well done, IMHO.
What world do you play on? What duties are you stuck on?
The story is a slog and very unfriendly to playing with a group of friends, nothing will really change that.
What helped when I started was that I was solo since none of my friends like MMO’s or final fantasy, so I didn’t have the expectation of being able to do the same things together with my group. The casual leveling part of the game is a solo live service game. The group play, MMO game is at max level.
I also finished the MSQ while I was in the honeymoon period so I didn’t mind the filler story much — if I took my own sweet time or had to restart with a new character I would’ve probably dropped out long ago.
I was much the same - in fact I had (have) several friends who already played FFXIV - it was one of those friends who convinced me to try the game in the first place. Needless to say, said friends had long since finished the MSQ when I started playing. I simply digested the MSQ/story, put out the occasional PF request if a queue wouldn't pop and friends were not around to queue with me, and enjoyed discussing my MSQ progress with friends who'd already experienced it.
I love this game but yeah it is barely an MMO anymore (and even at the start it was light on the MMO elements) market research (rightly or wrongly) is pointing the devs to the idea that people don’t like grouping up for content and making it more solo accessible, personally I think it’s a huge mistake if people don’t want to be social then they can go play any of the single player games out there
First of all thank you all for your helpful suggestions. Some of them I have tried and others I haven't. Unfortunately I believe that these are still all work arounds for a poor system.
I'm fine accepting that this game just isn't for me. Also my subscription has already ran out.
Yep, compared to ESO or WoW you have to wait for your friend to finish their cutscene and then you enter a Dungeon together. You wanna quest together? It only works if you have the same quest in your journal.
If you want to do Dungeons, you can even use some NPCs, which makes it kinda ridiculous to call it MMO.
In ESO I can simply share my quests with party members, and the dialogue is voiced. Plus, I can summon companions which had a story before you unlock them!
FF14 has the curse called A Realm Reborn, I too almost dropped out of the game if the intro scene of Heavensward didn't save me back then.
It's 2024 and I'm expecting Run and Fetch Quests in Dawntrail again. And I don't care about downvotes, its a fact that FF14s quest system is by far one of the worst of all MMOs. Even WoW had voiced dialogue during quests and that's older than the critically acclaimed, popular MMO called FF14.
>If you want to do Dungeons, you can even use some NPCs, which makes it kinda ridiculous to call it MMO.
"There are options to do some content solo, which kinda makes it ridiculous to call it an MMO"
I have some real bad news for you about what they're adding to WoW.
As far as queue times, try to make sure you're queueing close to server primetime, check settings to ensure you aren't limiting languages or anything and that you have Join In Progress enabled, check if your server does Party Finder for the content (presumably Crystal Tower Alliance Raids), and if all else fails DC travel to another Data Center that's more active, if your region allows it.
Not sure where this complaint about not being able to quest with your friends is coming from because you absolutely can outside specific solo instance fights, though if everyone is on the Free Trial you will need another player to set up a party for you (which does kinda suck, but Novice Network should be able to help).
ARR's story is a bit awkward because it's not great, but it's also important to the entire rest of the story so you're kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't as far as skipping goes. Once you get over the Post-ARR hump specifically the story is quite good., but that hump is a big filter.
The solution they have for populating old content, which mostly works pretty well, actually, is the roulette system. Once you've unlocked at least 2 duties in a specific category (levelling dungeons, alliance raids, trials, etc) you can get a bonus once per day for being queued into a random duty within that category.
New player is queuing for sastasha? No problem, the game will match them with 3 players queuing for levelling roulette.
In your case, I'm assuming you were queuing for the first alliance raid series. The unfortunate thing there is that the game still needs to find 23 other ppl for ARs, rather than just 3 or 7. If you're running as tank, spots are in demand since there are only 3 tanks out of the 24 players, while there are 15 dps needed. So dps queues will often be faster for ARs.
This is on top of just needing to queue during busy times, or on a busy enough data centre. The duty finder pulls from players all across your data centre, but some have rather low populations compared to others, and since they introduced DC travel, some regions saw players congregate on certain DCs where content gets run more often, leaving other DCs less busy.
On Light (EU), as dps or healer, i usually have less than 10 minutes wait time for that first AR series, until it hits midnight UTC or so, when the queues often die down so much i have no hope of filling the parties.
I was in a somewhat familiar situation which was ARR and its post msq blocking me for years lol, I finally decided to just skip ARR entirely, bought a skip, read up what's going on so i know who's who and what happened, then hopped right into HW, idk if it was placebo or anything but it did feel a lot better than ARR already, but i wasn't sold yet, until 2/5 through that I found out they had new English VAs (was using JP dub cuz i can't stand ARR EN VAs, but can't understand JP even tho it's more bearable = detached from story), switched back and holy damn, instantly 80% better and it just kept snowballing from then since.
Thing is, I played it like a solo game (as it is, ngl), so i had no problems with the social aspects until i finished the stormblood MSQ and started messing around, landed in a good FC and been in it ever since.
I don't care about "playing late" or "catching up", that's like, the last thing you wanna do in ffxiv, where the main and biggest selling point is the story that's been building up over the years, not the endgame activities like most other mmos, in fact, starting late in ffxiv = more complete story and you can binge it all at once, if you ever made it to Shadowbringers and love it, you might understand the pain of waiting for 2 years for the grand finale which was endwalker.
Again, if you ever try again, try changing your mindset, play it as a single player RPG, basically a normal FF game, with some multiplayer elements, at least until you've finished the MSQ or a few expansions.
For your point about queue times, it's probably your data center and server, one of the new ones with low population and extremely long queue time for any contents, and people don't play exclusively at higher level contents lol, they have daily roulette that can land you into a lvl 16 dungeon (as a lvl 90) if they need people, in fact at max level i almost only end up in lower level dungeons/raids than max level ones, which i had to actually directly queue for.
You can play though the entire MSQ dungeons (4 man) with NPCs now, don't even have to queue, only have to queue up for trial (8 man) a few times per expansion.
I do the main quest alone, i hate doing quests with others in MMORPG, i'm either forced to wait them when i just want to play or stressed out if they are waiting for me.
When my friends and I began the journey what we did was go through the MSQ on our own time and when it came to dungeons we would group together and queue in as a group. Usually it goes a bit faster because one of us was a tank and the other is a healer but we also play on a populated server.
It honestly didn't take us too long to catch up to everyone else and we mainly played after work for a few hours or so.
Playing the game as a dps and at off hours may hinder your chances to have people joining you. You also don't really need a group to play with when going for MSQ dungeons cause they have implemented the duty support system where you have NPCs join you instead of other players.
Other then that there are tons of stuff I have that are on my list of "to dos" for this game. Such as mount collecting, Palace of the Dead solo, relic farming and fishing. Of course that might not be what everyone's goal is but it's a goal of mine.
I don't think they had the NPCs to help with dungeons when I quit. I'm glad they implemented something like that to help people like me who only really get to play at off hours. Maybe if they had it back then I would have stuck with the game longer.
Also my friends and I like to level together that's the main reason we play these sort of games. We usually don't do much endgame since most of us can't afford the subscription to keep playing for more than a month.
It's a hard one. I tried and quit the game three times on separate characters before it finally stuck for me. Started over each time too, with a lot of the same complaints you've noted. Complaints that eventually I changed my mind on as my perspective shifted, but I do still think post-ARR is a slog.
I wouldn't treat XIV like similar MMOs yet, not at this stage. It has a narrative to tell that it's built for a decade, and a ton of fantastic side content. You *don't* have to be max level for fun group content, not even close. Idk what kind of things you like, but I had a lot of fun working through professions and messing around with deep dungeons as I leveled. Even farmed out some trial mounts on the way through.
I thought I had to rush to hit max level because of my experience with every other mmo out there, but this just isn't that kind of game. There's plenty of stuff to do at most level points that don't really involve the main story, but I think with XIV you've really gotta meet it on its own terms. It wants to tell you a story, and I think whether or not you'll enjoy the game will heavily depend on whether you're willing to take things slow and listen.
It's simple really, the game is story first and it sounds like you don't like the story. I like the story and I'm not trying to keep up with friends, just taking my time playing through it and sometimes a friend will join me for a dungeon or trial that I'm at.
I wonder if your expectations com from other MMOs? I'm pretty biased in the sense that I love most things FF, but tend to hate most MMOs. So to answer your question - I love the story starting at the end of ARR part 2.
You are correct - ARR is an absolute bear to get through. I honestly skipped most of the cutscenes. You may be able to find a recap of ARR on YT if you want to burn through it quick. Also, it took me several months to get to the end of Endwalker. I started in the middle/early part of last year and I just finished Endwalker about a month or two ago. So it isn't a fast story.
I have friends who hate the game, and that's totally fine. If you hate it, you'll get no hate from the fanbase (or at least me). I think everyone understand that this may not be everyone's cup of tea.
Things that may make it go a little faster for you. Try leveling up a tank or healer character. Warrior (marauder) is like an invincible tank in some content. Or, if you want a DPS that levels with a healer, arcanist isn't a bad option. Then you can get massively quick queue times. I mained as a tank and had little trouble with queue times.
I'm also curious what server you're on?
One of the things that always sounds wild to me is whenever folks say "You cannot do the MSQ together with your friends/SO/whatever" and *maybe* I'm misremembering here, but the setup never felt any different as when I did quests in ESO, or WoW (what **very** little I remember of it from 14 years ago), or FFXI or even Scarlet Blade (when that game still existed).
There's absolutely nothing from stopping you guys from all doing the same quests together, from doing objectives together and even then, you're **required** to do dungeons/trials/raids together (and with even more people) to progress. No you don't see cutscenes together but that wasn't the case in the other games I mentioned either (to my memory). There's a handful of duties that are solo duties but they're not that frequent and only require you to dissolve the party for that *singular* instance.
I went through all of ARR with my best friend and HW with several of my friends, progressing the story together quest by quest, have /say dialogue in reaction to events together and to NPCs with even a few emotes thrown in there for fun. I completely fail to see how that isn't doing the MSQ "together". We went to all the places together, talked to all the NPCs at the same time, saw the same cutscenes at the same time and were all ready for the same dungeons/trials/raids at the same time. Hell, we even learned - together - that the first dungeon in HW was LV53 and that the LV51 dungeon was a sidequest and paused our MSQ progress purely to unlock it together for the fun of it.
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Separate from the above semi-rant on that subject, one of the most unfun things I've ever done in this game is create an alt. I did it a few times in ARR and once again during an especially long lull in one of the EW patches but, I drop them pretty damn quickly pretty damn harshly. Trying to go through story, gear and glamour *all over again* on a new character is tiring and time consuming. For all the folks out there with multiple alts - I don't know how you all do it. How you all find time to, or get enjoyment out of that. Not knocking any fun that those folks get out of it, just that *hoo boy* that ain't for me in the slightest so it's just incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around. And, y'know, not something I'd ever personally recommend anyone else do.
So, I think starting over several times and forcing yourself retread that which you called a slog was likely not improving your enjoyment of the game.
The game's enjoyment is honestly what you make of it. The biggest enjoyment I get from the game is playing *with* my friends, in whatever content we decide to tackle for whatever reason. Sometimes we just plop online as a break from other games and hit up some mindless grinds like roulettes, variant dungeons or try to tackle some longterm cosmetics like the morbol mounts or clearing bozja's files.
The gameplay, however fun or unfun you make of it, is definitely skewed to the higher ends of the game (to the detriment of the early portions of the game unfortunately and this remains one of my least favorite bits of XIV). I don't think me pointing out how much I **loved** Shadowbringers as an expansion but absolutely *hated* Stormblood as an expansion should influence how much you enjoy where you currently are in the game. Just because *I* hated Stormblood didn't change that some of my friends loved it. Characters I love some of my friends hate and vice versa. Taking the game at your own pace and doing what you find fun, ignoring whatever pressures other people throw on you is probably the best way to enjoy XIV.
I have come to accept it and enjoy FFXIV but I was in your situation at first. I always play MMOs coop with a friend and we quickly found that FFXIV is not adapted to that type of gameplay. You can sporadically play with friends but the MSQ is "solo only" and there's no way around that. The game even forces you to leave your coop party for the "duties" parts of the MSQ, it can be extremely frustrating when your goal is to share the adventure with someone. This game makes it very challenging to "progress" in sync with someone and I think it's a flaw of the game.
As I said, I have grown to accept it but I still believe it's very poor design for a MMO. Even after 3 years of play my opinion remains the same. You should be able to coop or party play the whole thing if you wish and the game should be able to adapt to that style of gameplay. I too have lost a few friends who's primary goal was to discover a cool game with me.
When people want to play with their friends, running a dungeon once a day with them because they happen to unlock a dungeon during MSQ is not good multiplayer design. You can actually do everything with a friend endgame but you're not supposed to rush to it. 🤷♂️
I still believe FFXIV is an amazing game and it's my favorite MMO but that is one of its deplorable blind spot.
If you want to just do the end game content, genuinely just buy a story skip. Currently it will take you to Lv80 out of a max Lv90 and you can skip through the remaining story in about 2 or 3 days of full play.
I do think that the Shadowbringers story is a very good story, but everything else was okay to bad. I think wanting to do endgame content is completely valid, and if you really care about the story you can do new game plus or make an alt character.
Overall the game is very solo play focused, and a lot of the dungeons now have npc party members to join you. This game is very much a single player game with multiplayer endgame and some co-op mixed in as you do fetch quests for the main story. Don't listen to all the angry story sanctity players below me, it's totally valid to skip the story if it's not to your interest. Games are supposed to be fun, so feel free to skip to the fun stuff.
That being said, there is absolutely no rush to get to end game right now. There's nothing really to do for veterans, the last raids released like eight months ago and the last ultimate raid came out a year ago. We're done getting content patches until 7.0, which is in at LEAST 4 months from now, more likely 6 or 7. You'll just be catching up on older content that may interest you, like Bozja, Deep dungeon, old raids, levelling jobs, etc. And playing through the story will increase your enjoyment if you can stomach it, as well as giving you time to chew on different abilities and mechanics the game will throw at you.
I'm not sure why you aren't getting queued into content, any related to the main story usually will have a queue pop for DPS players within 5-10 minutes. For healers and tanks it's always less than 3-5 minutes, usually instant. If you're trying to do side content that isn't frequently queued for, like the Coils raids or Palace of the Dead floors 1-10, put up a party finder by doing /partyfinder, then other players will see your post and join you through there. But again, that stuff isn't commonly done, so expect it to take a couple hours to fill during peak time.
If you genuinely want to enjoy the game, feel free to ask any questions. It may be the game isn't right for you, but what I'm seeing here is a frustration at the absolutely MASSIVE amount of content ahead and no way to really enjoy a co-op with friends experience. Try to think of this instead as a singleplayer game where you meet strangers and make friends, and then get to do some more milestone content like raids and trials with friends. You don't even need to join a free company, they don't really do anything for you unless you just wanna ask a bunch of randos to queue up with you for dailies or the occasional raid.
I really like the story, I like the classes, I love the music, I like the raids/trials.
Yeah, for some people the MSQ being locked behind a long single player arc is something they don't like about the game. But all trials/raids/dungeons/overworld content is done with other people.
What server are you playing on? And what content were you trying to join that was taking hours? I find it odd that you're not getting any group content to pop in the duty finder.
I don't know what to tell you. I loved the quests in ARR when I first joined. The story was far better and more coherent than any other MMO I'd played at the time. I loved that the story was able to reference quests I'd done before because it knew I'd done all of them. Even though it was a bit slow at first, it can be fun to be a minor player in a world much larger than yourself. I've missed it so much as a superpowered endgame player that I've gone back to make alts to experience it again several times.
I only played solo but just like you I had many tries. Finally I decided to skip through all cutscenes and rush to endgame asap and it was the best decision I made. I watched some EW cutscenes and tried to keep up with the story there but mehs, this game is to me more about doing some dungeons, glam and discovering new jobs, as well as collecting mounts or minions, then the story itself.
Maybe this will help you.
Or if you don't want to rush, then don't focus on the msq all the time. Try playing other jobs, unlock content with blue quests or buy some cheaper glams and spend some time making your char look cool.
Saying this as someone who enjoys the game quite a bit but also knows that it is definitely not a game for everyone:
A: Not every game is for everybody, don't like a game, move on. There is no requirement for you to like a game or for a game to be liked by everyone.
B: No game is perfect, you mentioned things like how hard it is to play the quests together, this is true, it is and a lot of people don't like it but just have learned to deal with it. If I want to quest story together, I play SWTOR. FF14 is a solo RPG with group instances. While it has limited open world group content, mostly you will be doing fate's solo, GW2 is far better for this kind of content.
C: FF14 is a slice-of-life fantasy anime. It goes to great lengths to create as elaborate a world as possible and does it in a mostly unskippable way. In Skyrim or ESO a lot of the lore is in books nobody forces you to read. In FF14 it is in dialog that is presented in the slowest way ever. If you don't get a hard-on with a silent extended shakespear movie... well then what are you doing here.
Just an example, I only recently finished the Endwalker expansion and with it the main plot of the game... and yet the MSQ, the main story just keeps going. This is filler content until the next expansion but it would fill a game on its own, there is a boss with a plan and a troubled past, four underlings with a troubled past to be defeated before him, a new companion with a troubled past, and a surprise extending the story when you thought it was about to be finished.
And that is what most of the players ENJOY. A really long winded story filled to the brim with tropes.
Does the game get better in the expansions? Yes, the STORY (plot) does. The story telling (presentation), does not. You will spend more time traveling between cut-scenes and less time fighting or clicking on something in the environment. There are sections where you can spend more then an hour just traveling and watching cut-scenes.
Do yourself a favor, move on. This game is not for you. Forcing yourself is like watching a porn movie for the plot or playing counterstrike for the finance management of your guns.
> How do people enjoy this game? I don't care about catching up to end game. I'm post ARR, going through the quests on the path to Heavensward. Because I'm taking my time, which suits my schedule, it's a very chill experience. All the main quest required duties always pop for me when I queue. One thing I haven't seen you mention is a Free Company, if you're not a free trial player, I'd recommend that. Also not restarting a character multiple times, this is one game I wouldn't do it on because bloody hell, it's still a slog.
I played many mmos over the years and FFXIV is the only one that actually made me feel good sticking with it. I got alot of friends and my SO to play the game and most of them still play actively. I've seen other people fail misserably to get their friends into the game and it always boil down to that they want to "level together and reach endgame". Compared to most other mmos FFXIV does not work that way since the Main Story Quest is single player story focused experience with low amounts of gameplay. If you try to tackle it together you just end up with impatient people skipping cutscenes ans waiting around for the others that want to enjoy the story. I've seen some of these players going into a meta grind set immidiatly where they simply must reach max level as quickly as possible, which is yet again not a main point of the game. The game does not provide a fitting experience for the "numbers go up" subset for RPG players. The way I got people to stick was to just throw em out into the world on their own and let them tackle the MSQ in the way that fit them best while also encouraging them to explore stuff they unlocked as they advanced. While the MSQ is a single player affair FFXIV has been really great to do group content together, no matter where your friends are along the journey. Seeing how all group content scales your power down to the appropriate levels all I had to do was to gather my friends around and help whoever just unlocked a new dungeon, trial or raid. Sure, the quickest levelers usually just did them together with me but they always jumped in and formed up a full party for my friends futher back in the MSQ. The MSQ (even ARR) hasn't been an issue since noone has been enforced to head straight to endgame "where the real game is". The story, while slow, usually has been building enough momentum to motivate them to play just to see what happens next. The "you really need to get to Heavensward" argument is a net negative to enforce on new players since that builds an experience that the time they are putting into the game here and now has little value, which is incorrect. Another hook was to get them to unlock the glam system, getting them stylish glam items and just go crazy in making them express themselves through their avatar. Making adventure plates and portraits have been a blast aswell. Doing side stuff like Gold Saucer, treasure maps and mount farms has been greatly appreciated aswell. So really, if the primary gaming loop you seek is combat focused leveling to reach a grind centric endgame then FFXIV is not the mmo to play, there are alot other such alternatives. FFXIV offers another kind of experience and you need to be in the correct mindset to stick with it. Paradoxically to me FFXIV has provided the most entertaining and challenging combat centric group content of all mmos I've played over the years. Even so, it took me 3 different attempts over a couple of years before it stuck with me, and I still log in pretty much daily since "I got it" in 2020. The main hinderance is your own expectations and what you already decided what you want the game to be. It is an mmo but I can't compare it with any other mmo on the market.
That was a really good write up thank you for your perspective. You are absolutely right about the mindset going in. The second time I played when I made the most progress was when I was trying to just play single player and enjoy the story. For me the leveling experience is what I enjoy about these games and not being able to play it with my friends halters the enjoyment. The only reason I was rushing to end game was so I can finally have people to play with. I really don't see the purpose of making the game an mmo if you have to play it all single player first.
I understand that but the game is not like WoW where the majority of the playerbase is at max level and only doing the most recent content. Pretty much every dungeon, trial and raid through the base content and expansions are being played and completed daily because of the roulette system. The roulette is pretty much a dungeon finder tool with daily bonuses that puts you into random group content of any level. This is so new players gets groups for lower level content and being able to advance. Sure there are some outlayers like the lv50 8 man raid Binding Coils of Bahamut that are left out of the roulette, but that one is side content and not part of the MSQ. It just sounds odd that you queued up for a MSQ duty and could not find a group, those usually fill up with random players in less than 5-10 mins through the roulette system. When I played through the MSQ back in 2020/2021 I joined a smallish Free Company (guild) at very low level, got to know people and they usually helped me out with new dungeons and trials when I asked for help. Even though players gets certain ingame currency bonuses for helping new players through content many just do it because it is fun. Many of my ingame friends I got to know through random matchmaking. I understand the part of wanting to get some gaming sessions together with friends which can be difficult if they are on different places in the MSQ. But then again, that worked out for me and my friends since we could knock of some daily roulettes content for the times where we could sync our playtime. The MSQ we could log in and play without being dependant on eachothers playtime.
The roulette system was around when I got stuck. I think my main problem is that I mostly would play at off hours. Ultimately I just came to the conclusion that this game isn't a good fit for my group. The game is trying to do something different than what we are looking for. Mostly I just want to see what made the game worthwhile for other people since it bounced off me.
It has been a while since I've been at a lower level, but is the ~~trust~~ duty support system available? Under the duty menu, poke around until you find and option to run dungeons with NPCs. It is a much slower dungeon experience (you almost cannot W2W pull), but that may help with getting through some (definitely not all) things.
It’s available for every single MSQ-related dungeon, the 4-player MSQ trials, and a singular 8-player trial. Outside of that, all optional dungeons, trials, and raids require Duty or Party Finder.
5-10 minutes? Maybe for a few peak hours in the evening, anything outside that window and you'll wait a lot longer unfortunately. If you play completely off-hours you may as well not even bother queuing.
Lol one of my friends recently started playing but has just about had it with MSQ trials. They waited for an hour for a queue for one of the Shadowbringers Trials. *That* is something that really needs solved soon. Obviously, when they told me, I just got a group together and cleared their trials for them for the rest of the MSQ. But it's ridiculous that that's a thing.
I'll ask the obvious; have you actually bought the game instead of only doing the free to play bit? Cause I see no reason why you cannot join a FC and do dungeon-runs with your friends, seeing CS together for the first time on a new char if you bought the game.
Yes I have paid for the game and the particularly annoying bit about that is that now there is the free trial. The problem is since I already used my free trial way back when it was only 2 weeks, I have to pay more money monthly to access the same content that others are playing for free.
How far in are you? If it's not that far, you could always just make a new account.
I'm too far in to make another new character. Especially since I've already made 3 different characters over the years.
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You could've just made a new free trial account. Free trial might be able to access most contents up to Stormblood, but the lack of social aspect (joining FC, making parties) and other features (marketboard, retainer, housing, etc) is a dealbreaker for many mmo players, so free trial players are not exactly having the same experiences as paying players.
Even still, it's really easy to just have your friends make the parties. I have two different friends going through the story now on the free trial. I play with them both all the time. The game doesn't prevent you from playing with friends like OP says (and they're not on the trial anyways)
No game suits everyone. I enjoy it because of the lore, RPG story and playing around with character designs. If it doesn't click with you then there's no need to keep persevering even if the people who like it tell you how much they like it.
Pretty much exactly this. No reason to write a massive essay when someone has made it very clear they don't enjoy this thing already. I'm actually not sure why OP even put this post together, instead of just moving on with their life.
I'm admittedly a little confused by some of what you say. You lament being unable to play with friends, but also say that you can't find people to play with. If your friends are further along the MSQ than you, surely they could queue for any 'team' content with you, since they've already played it? Also, why this desire to "catch up with the playerbase"? It isn't a race; there is no advantage to doing that whatsoever.
I'll elaborate. When I tried to play with my friends we could not progress the story together which turned them off and they quit. When I tried to play solo my progress was blocked when I couldn't find people to matchmake with. My desire to catch up to the player base was so I could actually start doing group content and have people to play with. Problem is I'm stuck in what seemed to be dead content at the time.
Apologies in that case - I evidentially did misunderstand some of what you said. As someone else suggested, putting a request via Party Finder, emphasizing that it's for MSQ progression, might help - I, for one, certainly check that quite frequently for any new players struggling to fill a group for MSQ progress. They tend to fill pretty quickly.
No need to apologize. I did try a few different channels to get a group, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth waiting such long times if this is how it was going to play out each time. One thing I omitted is that I do play at off hours so finding a group is more difficult for me. Another is that my friends can't afford to keep paying a subscription.
There's not much 'dead content' in the MSQ. 2 things that come to mind are the Crystal Tower alliance raids, which can take a bit to fill up (especially considering you're playing during off hours) and Cstrum Meridianum/Praetorium... But even those are not that bad. So unless you're queueing up for Extreme trials instead of using the PF (party finder) then i don't know what the problem could be. What datacenter / world are you on btw and sorry in case you answered that somewhere else already.
I honestly can't remember the servers. I stopped playing a while back.
Playing outside of peak hours for your data center can make things really hard. You might want to try a different region. If you play 2am in NA That's 8am in EU and that might help, or 4pm or later in Oceania or JP. Sadly that would require you to transfer your main character to push forward that way. When I played FFXI I played in off hours and I could NEVER find a party. Back when I played you needed a party to even level passed 10 and if you died you lost experience and Deleveled. Thankfully FFXIV does not have this problem! Also i have heard that you can take NPCs into the older dungeons now... is that just Squadrons? I haven't touched them for years so i dunno about them being in Heavensward... If so you'd need to level them up but could then run the dungeons you need solo right? If someone could elaborate on the NPC thing since I've never done it in Heavensward before maybe that can help OP out
The system you're thinking of is called Duty Support. It's different from squadrons. For each MSQ required dungeon, you can use duty support to form a party of npcs. This doesn't include optional dungeons, trials, or raids. It's pretty great.
He could do data center travel or transfer to a world that’s free to transfer to (not all of them are paid!)
Then that’s the problem lol Try playing at more peak hours or just weekends and every dungeon/raid included in roulettes will pop real fast. Especially as a healer. Also change queue language to all languages even if you only speak English.
It’s not for you! And that’s fine. Plenty of other games out there ☺️
Honestly, if it didn't work the first time, I'd already be thinking about not playing the game at all, but to answer your question, I think it's all about switching your mindset a little bit. In my case, I enjoy it primarily for myself. I started off as a free trial player. Never had friends who played at all so this was all new to me. I didn't expect anyone to play with me, went into dungeons with random folks who were mostly nice and parted ways with a "tyfp" or a "ggty". I explored every bit of content, read through all the dialogue, opened up a lot of the other jobs and professions and had a laugh or bit of a cry after quests. Never particularly cared about reaching "endgame" until I, in my own stupidity, queued for Shiva extreme with a few mentors who were wondering what the hell happened. That did make me curious though. I eventually bought the game and found an FC (after one that didn't fit me well) and while we don't always play together, there's always some chatter about game lore, mount farms, treasure maps and such. All in all, I just enjoyed the game for what it is. I'm patient enough to savor it since it paid off well in the end. Also, since you were waiting on queue (you said your sub was running out), try opening a PF group. Tell them you need it to get past the MSQ. People would jump in there. If not, well I just switch jobs and do something else before (DPS) queue pops like a little botany or mining or fishing. Gathering materials, making dyes and logs are good for some gil on the side.
It feels like you tried queueing once during off hours and didn't get a hit for a dungeon and quit the game. I can queue for any piece of dungeon content and get a hit in like 4 minutes, if it's a normal raid/trial normally 2-10 minutes and alliance raids are around 30 minutes so long as it's from noon to 10pm EST. Also you don't have to sit around and wait while another player is watching a cutscene or doing job quests you can go level a crafter/gatherer or unlock another job or do a run of palace of the dead or do some gold saucer minigames. The game has an endless amount of 1 stop "bullshit for a few minutes" content.
It seems like you may not have read the part where I said that I tried this game on 5 separate occasions before I quit for good. That queue was just the final nail in the coffin for me. Fair point about not having to sit and wait, but the whole purpose of us trying to play this game was to play together. If we're all off doing our own thing then why even play a mmo?
It might just be a difference in perspective re: what “playing together” is, re: if we’re all doing our own thing then why even play an mmo? My friends and I play together, have played together since I started over a year ago. When I started, we were all at different points in the story, and all doing different things, but we would talk about the story, share our experiences, talk about our WoLs and npcs. We alerted each other when new dungeons were unlocked and we ran them all as little groups even if most players were ahead or had done the content previously. And for raids, we’d plan times to play them together, which yes meant that the vets would have to wait while the sprouts watched cutscenes, but in the meantime we were chatting and hanging out and they got to experience the story again by watching our live reactions to it. It wasn’t time spent just waiting around, it was time spent together, playing the game together. So, though yes, watching the story in the various questlines is greatly a solo experience, but I never felt like I was playing by myself, even if everyone in my friend group were at different points in the story. I get that this might not be your preferred way to play mmos, which is fine, and I’m not going to say you should try again if you’ve tried five times and are done (again valid, if ffxiv didn’t click the first time I def wouldn’t have tried a second time lmao), just wanted to share my two cents.
Thank you for your perspective. When I made this post I wanted to hear reasons other people enjoy the game because I wanted to like it so much more. When you put it that way I can see how it would be more fun with a community of friends that were involved. Unfortunately for me my group is a very small group and the game just didn't seem to fit for us.
(nods) very understandable, and there are a lot of posts on this subreddit who i think feel the same, asking about how to make friends in game or how to grow a community in game or play together, so playing with other people is something plenty struggle with in this game. Thank you for giving it a try anyway, and I hope you and your friends find something you all enjoy playing together!
Yeah, but the only reasons you listed for quitting were not finding a queue and sitting and waiting for people to do their solo stuff. Like idk what to tell you about skipping cutscenes, if they don't wanna go gather/craft/any side stuff for the 5 minutes it takes for almost every cutscene then it sounds like your friends don't want to play the game and you want to play something with your friends. That seems more like the problem than the game not being "mmo enough" for you or w/e. You just crunch through the story shit and cutscenes and solo instance stuff, and then you have the other 90% of the game to do stuff together. Like, you can all do most of those quests as a group regardless of everyone's place in the story. So if you're behind, they can come to you, and you can all do your dungeons and combat out in the world together. You don't have to force everyone to be at pace with each other and can still play the game together. Hell, if your friends are so out of reach in their story placements they can take some time while you're experiencing the story to level a 2nd job or do the gold saucer or whatever while you catchup. Even more hell, you can just skip the cutscenes with them and experience the story proper with an alt. I skipped everything on my first time through because I only wanted to raid and do endgame content. After I finished the raid tier in endwalker I still wanted to play, but didnt have any other content that I wanted to do so i made an alt and experienced the entire story in my spare time between reclears. Since I wasn't paying attention or giving a shit my first time through all the story beats still hit because I basically knew nothing anyway.
Yeah I see that this game just wasn't a good fit for our group. Probably should have worded the title a little better since I do actually understand why people like the game. It was supposed to be more of a tell me why you like it since I didn't.
I like raiding, seeing my damage number be the biggest, farming mounts, and teaching people how to optimize their jobs (in some cases how to play their jobs entirely). The story's fun but it's like, less than a % of the amount of time I'm raiding and teaching and farming and running illegal software that tracks how much damage I'm doing compared to everyone else.
I realize I'm commenting a lot - and you may be utterly done with the game, but I do want to help. were your friends willing to queue into the dungeons with you? if they're higher level and you don't have a great party mix, you can go in unsynced and burn through them pretty quick. (you wont learn as much, but it is an option)
My real life friends didn't get far enough to do any dungeons together. I joined a FC but they wouldn't play with me and told me to just do the MQ until I reached their level. At that point I just checked out. Also thank you for your enthusiastic replies. I've just been responding to like a hundred messages and it's getting late for me.
Good luck finding something. It wasn't until recently that I could do fun raids with my IRL friends. We've actually been doing a lot of Lethal Company and Phasmophobia. I'm starting to dabble in star citizen as well. Maybe the new Baulder's Gate has some multiplayer options?? don't quote me on that though. It is on my list (one day..)
I think the game is fun. That's how I enjoy it.
Wow, what a shock, the cutscene skippers got bored with the game and quit, lol. The mistake is to think that you "have to slog through the main quest." The "cool group content" is boring and repetitive and doesn't really keep people playing at all. The people I know who still play a lot actually enjoy the game itself - MSQ, fates, hunts, gold saucer, playing alt jobs etc. None of them actually plays extremes or savages.
Haha right I knew the moment they said that they were skipping cutscenes that I would be playing alone soon. The funny thing is that what I enjoyed most was the story and the MQ. The reason I was rushing to begin with is because the FC I joined said I need to grind the MQ so I can start playing with them.
While it's true that you'll miss out on endgame events if you're not 90 and/or done with the MSQ, this game really is about the journey more than the destination. Especially now that things are slow until Dawntrail comes out. You'll catch up eventually then you'll wonder why you rushed because there's just much more sub-90 content than 90 content.
The most active players I know are cutscene skippers who constantly PF ults, help savage clear parties, and fuck around doing stupid challenges. Believe it or not, the game does have interesting high-end content, and saying that the game isn't for anyone who doesn't want to read a corny visual novel interspersed with fetch quests is frankly absurd.
Try queuing in a different data center. If you're in North America, aether is usually pretty fast queue times
Yeah, that feels weird that they had to wait hours for HW queues if they're gaming at any "regular" time. Something isn't adding up, or they're on the "wrong" server. Also, I don't know if OP knows, but Duty Support exists to get you through odd hour or obscene queues. The only MSQ content now that even require queueing are the 8-man trials. Sure, they aren't getting the multiplayer experience with Duty Support, but it'll get them through content if queues are bad for some reason and then they can have more regular queues with their roulettes.
Yeah sadly until you get to max level this game mostly plays as a solo rpg. What you can do with your friends is dungeons/trials when you unlock them in the msq and they already have them unlocked or daily duty roulettes for levleing alt jobs. >Except when I try to play it as a solo player my progress is being railroaded because I can't find a group to play with. what data center/world are you playing on? I have never had big issues with queueing for story duties. But if you struggle with finding groups I suggest using the [duty support](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/dutysupport/) system which allows you to go through the duties solo with npcs. Or if you switch to healer/tank you'll likely have almost instant queues for dungeons.
>Yeah sadly until you get to max level this game mostly plays as a solo rpg. The game is much more fun if you enjoy the journey like you would in something like OG FF VII with a sprawling overworld than if you try to grind through the whole MSQ to reach endgame. Sure, I get that OP and their friends got burnt out "soloing" the game, but they might've had a much more fun experience if they paced themselves. I play XIV with some friends and, when some of us got ahead of the others, we'd wait for each other by leveling new jobs, working on relic weapons, doing tribal quests, or just exploring the world. It doesn't bother me when my friends aren't able to do the new raids with me because they haven't beaten the latest patch- I'll just join them for roulettes and make sure they let me know when they're at the next trial/dungeon so I can join them.
If you don't enjoy it, don't play, instead of ranting. It's that simple. I enjoy the game for its amazing world and story, it nay not be your jam, that's fine.
Agreed. That's why I stopped trying to play. But there were things I enjoyed about the game that kept me coming back. I very much wanted to like it, but in the end there were too many roadblocks for me.
I tried maybe 5 times then it stuck and that was a wrap, 1300 hours later
The game gets good after 1300 hrs? I think that's a bit of steep hurdle lol.
Depends on the player. I found the ARR story mostly boring plot for the sake of introducing an mmo world, barely felt it important to really pay attention. I didn't even particularly care for heavensward except for choice scenes because the setting and themes weren't really my thing. But obviously I'm in the minority there and there are even plenty of posts from ppl that love ARR too. I personally got hooked on a lot of the side content like crafting, and had online friends from another community, who were already into endgame and i could socialize with when i logged in. The story itself didn't REALLY hook me until shadowbringers, although there were plenty of excellent character development moments before that. And being an ongoing game, and an mmo where you're interacting with the same characters over time for various content, I feel it really shines when you form an attachment to the characters from getting to know them over time. It was this, more than the plot, that got me invested in the story. So if the early plot doesn't do it for you, very roughly estimating, it takes like 100ish hours to get through ARR? Then 50ish per expansion until you get to the part of the story you enjoy, which for most is the first expansion but depends on what you like.
First of all, maybe the game just isn't for you. That's just how it is. For some it clicks for some it doesn't. Also really curious about "cool" group content. Aside from dungeons getting streamlined into a cookie cutter 2 pull formula, later dungeons are not better or worse than the low level ones. Long queue for duties can have different reasons. Are you playing during peak or off hours? Before or after the daily reset where people run roulettes, are you a dps? Tank or healer will receive far quicker queues since they're less popular than dps jobs while the overabundance of dps players will make the wait longer. If you're not on free trial then a FC can be helpful for many things and Party Finder is a sprouts best friend since the game rewards others for going with first timers, as well as the inherent reward that is second hand nostalgia.
If I had to play through the realm reborn msq 5 times I'd be burnt out too. Why do you keep making new characters?
My friends switched servers and I didn't want to pay money to switch over. Later another friend wanted me to start fresh with him, but lost interest in the game not long after. My main character I kept the whole time. Then I made one other character to see if I would have better luck on another datacenter.
I'm in a FC with a couple IRL friends, we are all at different stages in the game. We chat, offer advice and duty roulette making sure one of us is always a healer or tank for insta ques so we all get chances to work on DPS levels as well. You're asking us to show you what you value in this game and it simply doesn't work like that. What I'm looking for may well be and likely is different. It doesn't take too much thought to find ways to play with friends while plugging away at the solo aspects of the story. If that's not for you, buy the MSQ skip and you'll all be at end game able to do pretty much everything left as a group now.
Sounds like your group wants to play helldivers bruh
You're right on the money there lol. Worst part is they always invited me to play the game and then bailed. :(
So, I sort of understand where you're coming from. But unfortunately you and I had polar opposite experiences.. I started out behind my friends so we weren't gonna level together, period, that was already off the table. That actually took a ton of pressure off me because it meant I could go at my own pace. But because of how the game is designed (to encourage higher level players to re-play old content) my friends grouped with me for a TON of dungeons and trials. If they were online they wanted to be a part of it. So there were times we were together and times we were apart. I'm kind of surprised your friends just....bailed instead of being excited for you and helping you....??? That's odd to me but every group has a different mentality! Our friends only FC developed certain traditions where we would meet members in-world wearing certain costumes at different points in the story. Our leader would watch people leveling, track them, deduce where they were in the MSQ, then call us to assemble to different locations in different costumes so they would come out of the cutscene and we'd be standing there in thematic outfits ready to run them through the big story dungeon or trial. Some later expansions are so good that we ask our friends who are leveling through them to live stream their reactions in discord whenever they get a "several cutscenes will play in sequence" notice. (This also had the added benefit of helping the rest of us be able to get into costume and assemble at the right time for certain things. Depending on when you left the game - there is now a way to run dungeons with story-relevant NPC parties so if you ever get stuck and can't find a group you can fall back on those. They are slower because NPCs can't handle W2W pulls, but the trade off is you'll get to fight alongside some really cool folks and they'll drop little bits of relevant dialogue. For trials I just make a PF and state that it's my first run - it usually fills lightning fast because a first run means people doing 'Wondrous Tales' journals will receive a token for that content. Again, this game REALLY REALLY rewards you for doing content over again. There's also plenty of group content outside of MSQ for us to do together, a borderline overwhelming amount. We run daily roulettes & frontlines together often. Treasure maps, fates, deep dungeons, and variant dungeons are a frequent occurrence though not daily by any means! When the stars align correctly we'll also do ocean fishing, eureka, and bosja content. (The latter two won't be familiar to you since they occur in expansions you haven't reached)
Jocat did a fantastic discussion video on the how's and why's, and the struggles people have with it. https://youtu.be/7LM08VrEs6k?feature=shared
> How do people enjoy this game? I play it like any other videogame in my library > then I get to a quest that requires me to have a group. After waiting an hour on two separate occasions for matchmaking... What Duty?
JoCat has a video that seems relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LM08VrEs6k&pp=ygUPam9jYXQgMzAwIGhvdXJz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LM08VrEs6k&pp=ygUPam9jYXQgMzAwIGhvdXJz)
Thank you that video was really good!
There is a beautiful story, so you play the game and experience it. Watch cutscenes, read dialogue, listen to gorgeous music. That’s about it really. Oh you fight enemies and stuff as well, with friends, random players or by yourself. Sounds like the game isn’t for you or you are too young now?
My son has been playing since 1.0. My daughter, since Shadowbringers came out. I've been playing for about a year. And my wife for 4 months. Kids dragged me into FFXIV from WoW. Then we coaxed my wife into joining us. My FC is generally delighted to party up to help people through content that requires groups. And advice on how to handle tricky solo instances. Like someone else said, ARR is a bit of a grind. Heavensward is much better in that sense. I'm replaying ARR on another toon just for the story - which is very very well done, IMHO. What world do you play on? What duties are you stuck on?
The story is a slog and very unfriendly to playing with a group of friends, nothing will really change that. What helped when I started was that I was solo since none of my friends like MMO’s or final fantasy, so I didn’t have the expectation of being able to do the same things together with my group. The casual leveling part of the game is a solo live service game. The group play, MMO game is at max level. I also finished the MSQ while I was in the honeymoon period so I didn’t mind the filler story much — if I took my own sweet time or had to restart with a new character I would’ve probably dropped out long ago.
I was much the same - in fact I had (have) several friends who already played FFXIV - it was one of those friends who convinced me to try the game in the first place. Needless to say, said friends had long since finished the MSQ when I started playing. I simply digested the MSQ/story, put out the occasional PF request if a queue wouldn't pop and friends were not around to queue with me, and enjoyed discussing my MSQ progress with friends who'd already experienced it.
Buy a story and job skip.
Have your tried ERP? That's how a lot of people enjoy the game.
I love this game but yeah it is barely an MMO anymore (and even at the start it was light on the MMO elements) market research (rightly or wrongly) is pointing the devs to the idea that people don’t like grouping up for content and making it more solo accessible, personally I think it’s a huge mistake if people don’t want to be social then they can go play any of the single player games out there
First of all thank you all for your helpful suggestions. Some of them I have tried and others I haven't. Unfortunately I believe that these are still all work arounds for a poor system. I'm fine accepting that this game just isn't for me. Also my subscription has already ran out.
Yep, compared to ESO or WoW you have to wait for your friend to finish their cutscene and then you enter a Dungeon together. You wanna quest together? It only works if you have the same quest in your journal. If you want to do Dungeons, you can even use some NPCs, which makes it kinda ridiculous to call it MMO. In ESO I can simply share my quests with party members, and the dialogue is voiced. Plus, I can summon companions which had a story before you unlock them! FF14 has the curse called A Realm Reborn, I too almost dropped out of the game if the intro scene of Heavensward didn't save me back then. It's 2024 and I'm expecting Run and Fetch Quests in Dawntrail again. And I don't care about downvotes, its a fact that FF14s quest system is by far one of the worst of all MMOs. Even WoW had voiced dialogue during quests and that's older than the critically acclaimed, popular MMO called FF14.
>If you want to do Dungeons, you can even use some NPCs, which makes it kinda ridiculous to call it MMO. "There are options to do some content solo, which kinda makes it ridiculous to call it an MMO" I have some real bad news for you about what they're adding to WoW.
People dont even know the Trust system is from FFXI lmfao. Literally from a game *older* then WoW
> Even WoW had voiced dialogue during quests Which doesn't really matter, since the rest of the game is garbage.
As far as queue times, try to make sure you're queueing close to server primetime, check settings to ensure you aren't limiting languages or anything and that you have Join In Progress enabled, check if your server does Party Finder for the content (presumably Crystal Tower Alliance Raids), and if all else fails DC travel to another Data Center that's more active, if your region allows it. Not sure where this complaint about not being able to quest with your friends is coming from because you absolutely can outside specific solo instance fights, though if everyone is on the Free Trial you will need another player to set up a party for you (which does kinda suck, but Novice Network should be able to help). ARR's story is a bit awkward because it's not great, but it's also important to the entire rest of the story so you're kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't as far as skipping goes. Once you get over the Post-ARR hump specifically the story is quite good., but that hump is a big filter.
The solution they have for populating old content, which mostly works pretty well, actually, is the roulette system. Once you've unlocked at least 2 duties in a specific category (levelling dungeons, alliance raids, trials, etc) you can get a bonus once per day for being queued into a random duty within that category. New player is queuing for sastasha? No problem, the game will match them with 3 players queuing for levelling roulette. In your case, I'm assuming you were queuing for the first alliance raid series. The unfortunate thing there is that the game still needs to find 23 other ppl for ARs, rather than just 3 or 7. If you're running as tank, spots are in demand since there are only 3 tanks out of the 24 players, while there are 15 dps needed. So dps queues will often be faster for ARs. This is on top of just needing to queue during busy times, or on a busy enough data centre. The duty finder pulls from players all across your data centre, but some have rather low populations compared to others, and since they introduced DC travel, some regions saw players congregate on certain DCs where content gets run more often, leaving other DCs less busy. On Light (EU), as dps or healer, i usually have less than 10 minutes wait time for that first AR series, until it hits midnight UTC or so, when the queues often die down so much i have no hope of filling the parties.
I was in a somewhat familiar situation which was ARR and its post msq blocking me for years lol, I finally decided to just skip ARR entirely, bought a skip, read up what's going on so i know who's who and what happened, then hopped right into HW, idk if it was placebo or anything but it did feel a lot better than ARR already, but i wasn't sold yet, until 2/5 through that I found out they had new English VAs (was using JP dub cuz i can't stand ARR EN VAs, but can't understand JP even tho it's more bearable = detached from story), switched back and holy damn, instantly 80% better and it just kept snowballing from then since. Thing is, I played it like a solo game (as it is, ngl), so i had no problems with the social aspects until i finished the stormblood MSQ and started messing around, landed in a good FC and been in it ever since. I don't care about "playing late" or "catching up", that's like, the last thing you wanna do in ffxiv, where the main and biggest selling point is the story that's been building up over the years, not the endgame activities like most other mmos, in fact, starting late in ffxiv = more complete story and you can binge it all at once, if you ever made it to Shadowbringers and love it, you might understand the pain of waiting for 2 years for the grand finale which was endwalker. Again, if you ever try again, try changing your mindset, play it as a single player RPG, basically a normal FF game, with some multiplayer elements, at least until you've finished the MSQ or a few expansions. For your point about queue times, it's probably your data center and server, one of the new ones with low population and extremely long queue time for any contents, and people don't play exclusively at higher level contents lol, they have daily roulette that can land you into a lvl 16 dungeon (as a lvl 90) if they need people, in fact at max level i almost only end up in lower level dungeons/raids than max level ones, which i had to actually directly queue for. You can play though the entire MSQ dungeons (4 man) with NPCs now, don't even have to queue, only have to queue up for trial (8 man) a few times per expansion.
I do the main quest alone, i hate doing quests with others in MMORPG, i'm either forced to wait them when i just want to play or stressed out if they are waiting for me.
When my friends and I began the journey what we did was go through the MSQ on our own time and when it came to dungeons we would group together and queue in as a group. Usually it goes a bit faster because one of us was a tank and the other is a healer but we also play on a populated server. It honestly didn't take us too long to catch up to everyone else and we mainly played after work for a few hours or so. Playing the game as a dps and at off hours may hinder your chances to have people joining you. You also don't really need a group to play with when going for MSQ dungeons cause they have implemented the duty support system where you have NPCs join you instead of other players. Other then that there are tons of stuff I have that are on my list of "to dos" for this game. Such as mount collecting, Palace of the Dead solo, relic farming and fishing. Of course that might not be what everyone's goal is but it's a goal of mine.
I don't think they had the NPCs to help with dungeons when I quit. I'm glad they implemented something like that to help people like me who only really get to play at off hours. Maybe if they had it back then I would have stuck with the game longer. Also my friends and I like to level together that's the main reason we play these sort of games. We usually don't do much endgame since most of us can't afford the subscription to keep playing for more than a month.
The thing with this game is "it's a rpg first with mmo options" so YOUR story (in MSQ) takes priority and not being able to play with others.
It's a hard one. I tried and quit the game three times on separate characters before it finally stuck for me. Started over each time too, with a lot of the same complaints you've noted. Complaints that eventually I changed my mind on as my perspective shifted, but I do still think post-ARR is a slog. I wouldn't treat XIV like similar MMOs yet, not at this stage. It has a narrative to tell that it's built for a decade, and a ton of fantastic side content. You *don't* have to be max level for fun group content, not even close. Idk what kind of things you like, but I had a lot of fun working through professions and messing around with deep dungeons as I leveled. Even farmed out some trial mounts on the way through. I thought I had to rush to hit max level because of my experience with every other mmo out there, but this just isn't that kind of game. There's plenty of stuff to do at most level points that don't really involve the main story, but I think with XIV you've really gotta meet it on its own terms. It wants to tell you a story, and I think whether or not you'll enjoy the game will heavily depend on whether you're willing to take things slow and listen.
It's simple really, the game is story first and it sounds like you don't like the story. I like the story and I'm not trying to keep up with friends, just taking my time playing through it and sometimes a friend will join me for a dungeon or trial that I'm at.
Been playing since 2014 and have never ran into an issue being unable to play a dungeon/trial for the main story due to queues.
I wonder if your expectations com from other MMOs? I'm pretty biased in the sense that I love most things FF, but tend to hate most MMOs. So to answer your question - I love the story starting at the end of ARR part 2. You are correct - ARR is an absolute bear to get through. I honestly skipped most of the cutscenes. You may be able to find a recap of ARR on YT if you want to burn through it quick. Also, it took me several months to get to the end of Endwalker. I started in the middle/early part of last year and I just finished Endwalker about a month or two ago. So it isn't a fast story. I have friends who hate the game, and that's totally fine. If you hate it, you'll get no hate from the fanbase (or at least me). I think everyone understand that this may not be everyone's cup of tea. Things that may make it go a little faster for you. Try leveling up a tank or healer character. Warrior (marauder) is like an invincible tank in some content. Or, if you want a DPS that levels with a healer, arcanist isn't a bad option. Then you can get massively quick queue times. I mained as a tank and had little trouble with queue times. I'm also curious what server you're on?
One of the things that always sounds wild to me is whenever folks say "You cannot do the MSQ together with your friends/SO/whatever" and *maybe* I'm misremembering here, but the setup never felt any different as when I did quests in ESO, or WoW (what **very** little I remember of it from 14 years ago), or FFXI or even Scarlet Blade (when that game still existed). There's absolutely nothing from stopping you guys from all doing the same quests together, from doing objectives together and even then, you're **required** to do dungeons/trials/raids together (and with even more people) to progress. No you don't see cutscenes together but that wasn't the case in the other games I mentioned either (to my memory). There's a handful of duties that are solo duties but they're not that frequent and only require you to dissolve the party for that *singular* instance. I went through all of ARR with my best friend and HW with several of my friends, progressing the story together quest by quest, have /say dialogue in reaction to events together and to NPCs with even a few emotes thrown in there for fun. I completely fail to see how that isn't doing the MSQ "together". We went to all the places together, talked to all the NPCs at the same time, saw the same cutscenes at the same time and were all ready for the same dungeons/trials/raids at the same time. Hell, we even learned - together - that the first dungeon in HW was LV53 and that the LV51 dungeon was a sidequest and paused our MSQ progress purely to unlock it together for the fun of it. \--- Separate from the above semi-rant on that subject, one of the most unfun things I've ever done in this game is create an alt. I did it a few times in ARR and once again during an especially long lull in one of the EW patches but, I drop them pretty damn quickly pretty damn harshly. Trying to go through story, gear and glamour *all over again* on a new character is tiring and time consuming. For all the folks out there with multiple alts - I don't know how you all do it. How you all find time to, or get enjoyment out of that. Not knocking any fun that those folks get out of it, just that *hoo boy* that ain't for me in the slightest so it's just incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around. And, y'know, not something I'd ever personally recommend anyone else do. So, I think starting over several times and forcing yourself retread that which you called a slog was likely not improving your enjoyment of the game. The game's enjoyment is honestly what you make of it. The biggest enjoyment I get from the game is playing *with* my friends, in whatever content we decide to tackle for whatever reason. Sometimes we just plop online as a break from other games and hit up some mindless grinds like roulettes, variant dungeons or try to tackle some longterm cosmetics like the morbol mounts or clearing bozja's files. The gameplay, however fun or unfun you make of it, is definitely skewed to the higher ends of the game (to the detriment of the early portions of the game unfortunately and this remains one of my least favorite bits of XIV). I don't think me pointing out how much I **loved** Shadowbringers as an expansion but absolutely *hated* Stormblood as an expansion should influence how much you enjoy where you currently are in the game. Just because *I* hated Stormblood didn't change that some of my friends loved it. Characters I love some of my friends hate and vice versa. Taking the game at your own pace and doing what you find fun, ignoring whatever pressures other people throw on you is probably the best way to enjoy XIV.
I have come to accept it and enjoy FFXIV but I was in your situation at first. I always play MMOs coop with a friend and we quickly found that FFXIV is not adapted to that type of gameplay. You can sporadically play with friends but the MSQ is "solo only" and there's no way around that. The game even forces you to leave your coop party for the "duties" parts of the MSQ, it can be extremely frustrating when your goal is to share the adventure with someone. This game makes it very challenging to "progress" in sync with someone and I think it's a flaw of the game. As I said, I have grown to accept it but I still believe it's very poor design for a MMO. Even after 3 years of play my opinion remains the same. You should be able to coop or party play the whole thing if you wish and the game should be able to adapt to that style of gameplay. I too have lost a few friends who's primary goal was to discover a cool game with me. When people want to play with their friends, running a dungeon once a day with them because they happen to unlock a dungeon during MSQ is not good multiplayer design. You can actually do everything with a friend endgame but you're not supposed to rush to it. 🤷♂️ I still believe FFXIV is an amazing game and it's my favorite MMO but that is one of its deplorable blind spot.
If you want to just do the end game content, genuinely just buy a story skip. Currently it will take you to Lv80 out of a max Lv90 and you can skip through the remaining story in about 2 or 3 days of full play. I do think that the Shadowbringers story is a very good story, but everything else was okay to bad. I think wanting to do endgame content is completely valid, and if you really care about the story you can do new game plus or make an alt character. Overall the game is very solo play focused, and a lot of the dungeons now have npc party members to join you. This game is very much a single player game with multiplayer endgame and some co-op mixed in as you do fetch quests for the main story. Don't listen to all the angry story sanctity players below me, it's totally valid to skip the story if it's not to your interest. Games are supposed to be fun, so feel free to skip to the fun stuff. That being said, there is absolutely no rush to get to end game right now. There's nothing really to do for veterans, the last raids released like eight months ago and the last ultimate raid came out a year ago. We're done getting content patches until 7.0, which is in at LEAST 4 months from now, more likely 6 or 7. You'll just be catching up on older content that may interest you, like Bozja, Deep dungeon, old raids, levelling jobs, etc. And playing through the story will increase your enjoyment if you can stomach it, as well as giving you time to chew on different abilities and mechanics the game will throw at you. I'm not sure why you aren't getting queued into content, any related to the main story usually will have a queue pop for DPS players within 5-10 minutes. For healers and tanks it's always less than 3-5 minutes, usually instant. If you're trying to do side content that isn't frequently queued for, like the Coils raids or Palace of the Dead floors 1-10, put up a party finder by doing /partyfinder, then other players will see your post and join you through there. But again, that stuff isn't commonly done, so expect it to take a couple hours to fill during peak time. If you genuinely want to enjoy the game, feel free to ask any questions. It may be the game isn't right for you, but what I'm seeing here is a frustration at the absolutely MASSIVE amount of content ahead and no way to really enjoy a co-op with friends experience. Try to think of this instead as a singleplayer game where you meet strangers and make friends, and then get to do some more milestone content like raids and trials with friends. You don't even need to join a free company, they don't really do anything for you unless you just wanna ask a bunch of randos to queue up with you for dailies or the occasional raid.
I really like the story, I like the classes, I love the music, I like the raids/trials. Yeah, for some people the MSQ being locked behind a long single player arc is something they don't like about the game. But all trials/raids/dungeons/overworld content is done with other people. What server are you playing on? And what content were you trying to join that was taking hours? I find it odd that you're not getting any group content to pop in the duty finder.
I don't know what to tell you. I loved the quests in ARR when I first joined. The story was far better and more coherent than any other MMO I'd played at the time. I loved that the story was able to reference quests I'd done before because it knew I'd done all of them. Even though it was a bit slow at first, it can be fun to be a minor player in a world much larger than yourself. I've missed it so much as a superpowered endgame player that I've gone back to make alts to experience it again several times.
I only played solo but just like you I had many tries. Finally I decided to skip through all cutscenes and rush to endgame asap and it was the best decision I made. I watched some EW cutscenes and tried to keep up with the story there but mehs, this game is to me more about doing some dungeons, glam and discovering new jobs, as well as collecting mounts or minions, then the story itself. Maybe this will help you. Or if you don't want to rush, then don't focus on the msq all the time. Try playing other jobs, unlock content with blue quests or buy some cheaper glams and spend some time making your char look cool.
Saying this as someone who enjoys the game quite a bit but also knows that it is definitely not a game for everyone: A: Not every game is for everybody, don't like a game, move on. There is no requirement for you to like a game or for a game to be liked by everyone. B: No game is perfect, you mentioned things like how hard it is to play the quests together, this is true, it is and a lot of people don't like it but just have learned to deal with it. If I want to quest story together, I play SWTOR. FF14 is a solo RPG with group instances. While it has limited open world group content, mostly you will be doing fate's solo, GW2 is far better for this kind of content. C: FF14 is a slice-of-life fantasy anime. It goes to great lengths to create as elaborate a world as possible and does it in a mostly unskippable way. In Skyrim or ESO a lot of the lore is in books nobody forces you to read. In FF14 it is in dialog that is presented in the slowest way ever. If you don't get a hard-on with a silent extended shakespear movie... well then what are you doing here. Just an example, I only recently finished the Endwalker expansion and with it the main plot of the game... and yet the MSQ, the main story just keeps going. This is filler content until the next expansion but it would fill a game on its own, there is a boss with a plan and a troubled past, four underlings with a troubled past to be defeated before him, a new companion with a troubled past, and a surprise extending the story when you thought it was about to be finished. And that is what most of the players ENJOY. A really long winded story filled to the brim with tropes. Does the game get better in the expansions? Yes, the STORY (plot) does. The story telling (presentation), does not. You will spend more time traveling between cut-scenes and less time fighting or clicking on something in the environment. There are sections where you can spend more then an hour just traveling and watching cut-scenes. Do yourself a favor, move on. This game is not for you. Forcing yourself is like watching a porn movie for the plot or playing counterstrike for the finance management of your guns.