Deleted entire part of post that was a response to Mikodesu, because while it contained no story spoilers, it might still be stuff she doesn't want to know. Even though they're things I wish I'd known from the start (I feel my playthrough would have been better for knowing them), that's just me, so...better not say anything after all!
~
I am a bit disgusted with myself. Well...it's not
entirely my fault, because I did look it up first! But I should have looked MORE. I shouldn't have believed one or two articles. I should specifically have looked up trials. This is what I saw:
Title: "
Final Fantasy 14 Patch 6.5 notes now let players play solo through Endwalker"
Subtitle: "
Duty Support has been added for some of the final Endwalker content, allowing players to play through Final Fantasy 14's main campaign with the help of an NPC party."
A portion of cut-and-pasted content: "
Duty Support has been around for quite some time already, giving you the opportunity to take on quests and dungeons with a team of NPC party members, but now that support has been extended to the final bits of Endwalker. That means as of Final Fantasy 14 Patch 6.5, you can play from the beginning of the A Realm Reborn era all the way through Endwalker main quest content solo."
Another site, IGN, also wrote this: "Square Enix has finally made it possible to play all of Final Fantasy 14 completely solo despite it being a massively multiplayer online game. As reported by VG247, Final Fantasy 14's patch 6.5 has brought the game's Duty Support system — which lets players bring NPCs into dungeons instead of other players — up to date to include every part of the game."
And I believed it.
And my beef with this? This is the information I decided to return to the game on. But...Final Fantasy XIV is no more soloable for me now than it was before the most recent update (6.5 in October, I mean.) You still run into Thornmarch at exactly the same point, and it is still unsoloable. A party of NPCs is still not available to run
trials. (8-member party battles.) So I will have to stop at the same point I did last time.
I'm not complaining that it's not soloable. FFXIV is an MMO. They want to bring in even more players because they need or want the revenue, so they're trying to cater to solo-preferers as well as MMO-lovers. That's their decision, and it makes good business sense. They aren't
obliged to make an MMO solo-friendly and half of the entire honking massive game is FREE, so it's not like I've been ripped off. And I feel a bit sorry for the MMO-lovers who are complaining that catering to soloists is diluting or changing their MMO experience.
Fortunately I decided not to buy it as I felt like I was rushing to that decision when my budget is so limited and it was already soaking up too much of my time. (And ALL of my game time.) So I figured I'd better wait. Somethign made me go and look things up again, and I found the same misleading articles again, too. There is more than one article still out there stating that FFXIV is now 100% soloable in the MSQ. BUT IT IS
NOT. But I found a collapsed comments section on one of them and followed the trail.
That would have been about 30% of my entire year's budget wasted.

Lucky for me I was so hesitant about it! I feel like I've wasted a lot of time, but y'know, it's not like it wasn't fun. It's just very unsatisfying to be stopped like this, because of stupidity (mine) and misinformation. I can do an acceptable 'basic' rotation as a Summoner or a Warrior. But I can't switch tactics with changing circumstances. When things get urgent/hectic, I forget every control combination, I can't remember which attacks do what...all the bad stuff. And I never get better. My coordination, my eye-hand communication speed, only seems to decrease as time goes on, it never improves.
I cannot be inflicted on other players. Even if they were nice about it, I wouldn't become better with time. Maybe a
tiny bit, if I played a stupid amount and found a miraculously good cross hotbar battle layout, but I'll never be good enough at noticing and reacting to ever be anything but a burden.
Well, no money lost, just time and considerable headspace. And I feel goofy for believing right away that they had made the MSQ 100% soloable when I was
expecting it to be at least another year before they got to the point of having the 8-man trials workable with a party of NPCs.
Time to go back to
true solo gaming and stop all this dabbling in stuff I know I just can't do without
way more dedication than I'm willing to give to a single game. I'd pretty much have to dedicate my life to become good at FFXIV, and that would be ridiculous.