You guys think this would still be an issue if they locked this behind a level 61-62 funneling people into a grind session? That would better than whats happening now.
There were two ways to handle this.
- Rework the MSQ to flow in a different way, allowing more to happen before the events of the first two solo instances. Ideally, you have the first mandatory dungeon beforehand, because the dungeon in and of itself will inevitably stagger player progression in the first couple of hours in a way go-from-A-to-B fetch quests and cutscenes cannot. Also, probably, give jobs
meaningful entry level 60 quests that do not require a solo instance. Basically, the goal is to have everyone spread out as much as possible as soon as possible.
Additionally, from a personal perspective, the first solo instance didn't need to happen. It felt a lot like something we'd seen and done before. I get the importance of the second one (although making it a soloable instance with flexible group size would have been better/less stress for the system maybe), but the first one is alright but not really elevated. Those events don't become super memorable from being interactive, and pretty much every solo quest after at least tries to stand out.
My preferred version though is:
- figure out how to implement solo instance queues. This way no matter what content you design, the server has a way to give people ordering for it. The massive lines show people would have been fine waiting hours to get in, if there was an actual sense of progress to it. If people could queue for Cold Steel, be told a four hour estimated wait, and go screw around doing other things for a while, it works out. Launches are busy, and we have to accept that.
But instead there's no progress. Clicking for 20,000 times on the first day doesn't make your 20,001st click any more likely to succeed than some guy's first who just started today. Players can't meaningfully impact it, help each other, or have any real influence over it. That's awful.
I'm usually not super attached to the story, but if XIV wants to be able to prioritize the single player instances, their best solution is to come up with something repeatable to handle if things get bad, instead of trying to rearrange everything around a known issue.
You can do a lot more wandering around or semi-afk irl then manually spamming an npc
And this is a thing--I got past the NPC early but ended up spending a lot of the day mostly afk, checking in periodically to see if more people had gotten through to start doing more. That was a whole lot less personally annoying than most people who couldn't leave the freaking NPC for 10 hours.