Story skip. Basically only journalists use them when there’s a new patch and they can’t invest the time before they review the next patch. Very few gamers use them.

Story skips are to be honest detrimental for the player because you suddenly don’t know who the fuck any of the core NPC are, you have not bonded with them, and you are doing crazy shit with them. You miss out most of the story beats that make FFXIV worth playing.

In any case, about raid content, it is expected to be max level of an expansion within the week, being able to buy a skip to the beginning of the current expansion doesn’t influence that at all because most players will already be there when the expansion launches.

The most PTW thing I can see in ffxiv is the ability to buy retainers who farm some stuff for you to have a very minimal edge in gold, but you get a free retainer and I’ve not sent it to farm because hold doesn’t mean anything in this game tbh. Even if you want to get an edge with gold this again is super low tier because the only “competitive content relevant” thing you can buy is crafted gear than other players put in the marketplace, and usually if you play regularly you would naturally have enough gold to buy it anyway. The best ILVL items can only be unlocked through content.

As others have said, the story skips are kinda awful.

Plus, I gotta say that it doesn’t really make a difference. They don’t give anyone an advantage over anyone else and don’t impact the way you experience the game at all. If you don’t like them, just don’t buy them.

At worst, you’ll run into some guys who are really bad because they skipped a huge portion of the game to get to modern content. But it doesn’t give them any edge over you by any means.

Again, I can’t stress enough how these affect other players 0%.

Replying 19 hours later but…

Yes, FF14 does have options to skip story or (most) character levels. They are, like others have stated, primarily targeted towards players who are levelling alts (which the game by nature doesn’t really need as much).

FF14’s story is amazing, but it’s long and not necessarily something you want to repeat.

And while this is effectively buying levels, FF14 is not designed as a pay-to-win game. The amount of experience required to reach maximum level is balanced for someone who is playing the game legitimately – unlike P2W games where requirements are artificially inflated to encourage you to spend money. You will get most or all of the experience you need to hit max level just from following the storyline and a moderate amount of side quests (on one class anyways.)

That said, many FF14 players say that fashion is the true endgame… and there are a lot of nice-looking items on the store. So I suppose it depends on what your definition of “winning” is. 🙃