I honestly can't get even remotely interested in committing to the multi-hour quest lockin for The New War or anything beyond it. There are just too many downsides (this would be far too long if I attempted to list them all,) and I don't think a Skip Pack could even begin to adequately address most of them. A platinum cost would likely just add to complaints that the game isn't truly F2P. I think DE will ultimately regret even trying to add a pack of this type. Even the lockin for the much shorter War Within, and the fact some people got their accounts effectively locked for a while due to progstop bugs in it over the years, is already a significant sour point. The New War ramps that up to 11. I have extensively upgraded mechs and a ship, those two aren't even the issues for me - there are so many others.
I think the real solution must come in the form of branching the questline much earlier in the tree like Duviri as the only path forward. Zariman is already FAR too deep in the chain. IMO it should remain an endpoint, never to become a waypoint to even more impractically distant content.
I therefore propose the alternative of severing Whispers from The New War and even The War Within, and instead dropping the requirements to the intro Deimos and Duviri quests as an answer to the problem the Story Pack is supposed to solve, but IMO cannot. I would also recommend avoiding any lockin quests going forward and removing the lockins from The New War and The War Within as a way to make the game more friendly to players. Quest lockins in a live service that has progstop bugs in quests on a fairly regular basis just isn't a winning combination. As it is, if I can't play new content without The New War, I'll just stick to the old content early in the quest chain, and I know a lot of other people who will too. A Story Pack, especially one that costs plat, won't change that, it simply won't effectively exist to me as anything but another disappointment. I feel DE's recent direction regarding quests has often been an evolutionary dead-end that may hurt company and players alike.
Finally, I want to urge DE to be more thoughtful towards busy adult players who don't get a lot of time to game and want to do so as a means to socialize with friends - long solo quests and extensive content prerequisites often drive me and my friends to less-demanding games to socialize over because new content is increasingly just not viable for those purposes. Trying to monetize that artificially created problem instead of fixing it for free is... ahem... likely to backfire and continue to drive us to other games that don't impose it to begin with. It would be nice if Warframe were more practical for that kind of gaming.
