FFXIV should have an addon where people can thumbs-up or thumbs-down whether some dialog is worth reading or if you should just skip past it. and then everyone can see those ratings before they decide whether to read something or not. I genuinely think that would be incredibly helpful for the community to have

every MMO has to have an unreasonable amount of filler because that’s how they keep players occupied long enough to make the next expansion. FFXIV, being a story-first game, puts a lot of that filler in the form of dialog. so NPCs will prattle on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how you should deliver wine to some guy, then you walk over to the guy and he prattles on about how you gave him wine

but if there was a way to know what dialog is filler and what dialog is worth reading, that would alleviate a ton of the problems that FFXIV players face - especially new ones who have to deal with the incredibly slow start of the story

it might even convince me to not skip past every bit of MSQ dialog I encounter :P

I do like the sidequests in FFXIV though! because:

• I get to very granularly choose what I’m interested in and what I’m not
• there’s a lot of combat! there aren’t too many “go talk to this guy. now talk to this guy. now travel across the planet and talk to this guy. now travel back again and talk to this guy” quests
• if I’m bored by some quest text, I can skip it and I won’t be confused about any of the other quest text (unlike the MSQ which I couldn’t understand if I tried at this point lol)
• the stories aren’t about me, the stakes are low, and nothing is trying to be an emotional rollercoaster. it’s a very comfy experience
• I get to learn about the world and its cities and cultures and people!

FFXIV sidequests are almost exactly how WoW quests are except they’re often a little bit better-written and I think that’s pretty cool actually

also! here’s a trick that I’ve learned for quests that you’re unsure about:

• accept the quest, then skip past all the dialog
• read a summary of the quest in your quest log
• if it sounds interesting, abandon the quest and you can read the dialog again!
• if not, skip past all of the dialog for that quest