New Characters, No Players

[Roris]

They did do an emergency holiday sale for a reason after all, now just hope those new players stick with the game until late February-early March.

[EvokerKeii]

Unfortunately you and your friend are running into one of the core issues with this game.
In other games (excluding FFXI because that's a differen't beast entirely) you had a 1 class per character mechanic which meant if you wanted to play a new class you rolled a new character and had access to all the quests and missions and other one-time events that go hand in hand with a new character. In this game you have all the classes rolled into one character. It's not just a perk, it's designed so that classes can benefit from other class abilities (we'll get back to that in a moment). This creates an issue where the majority of people are going to focus on one character since that's the design of the game. However once you roll through the story and sidequests once, you lose that path of advancement for leveling other classes which isn't an issue in a one class per character situation.
What this does is creates the path of least resistance for players looking to level other classes, or to put it another way, the path with the most advancement for the least amount of work or risk vs reward. Since currently FATE grinding is the path of least resistance and a majority of players have already completed their main story quest path of advancement, everyone is currently doing that. That leaves less players to run dungeons because they're more risky and offer less reward. That is less people queuing up for dungeons and causing the average wait time to go up for everyone. Why run a dungeon when you can just get more EXP faster for less work through FATEs?
There is also another issue; there are less new people joining the game. This game had a rocky start and word of mouth travels fast. People don't want to join a game that has a lot of issues and this game certainly has plenty. One of the biggest issues for new people are server lockouts. Yes, they are STILL happening. When people can't create a new character on a server with their friends because character creation is locked on that server it's immediately discouraging. But that's another post entirely.
Getting back on topic; Squeenix is trying to fix the problem with people not running dungeons for 2.1 coming in a couple weeks. They're trying to add better rewards and more of a reason to get people into those dungeons and away from FATEs. That should help solve you and your friend's problem. For now, there's nothing you can really do about it.

Also to address a previous point I had made, I realize your friend likes creating new characters for each class and I also realize you don't want to hear anything about that but as a friendly guide I must say. The game was designed for people playing multiple classes on one character. From the job system that requires you have a 30 in one class and a 15 in a second, to cross class abilities that become vital later on that requires you leveling a different class entirely (looking at you Swiftcast), the only thing you're doing by separating them by different characters is hurting yourself. Swiftcast->Raise has become such a fundamentally vital tool that the people I play with refuse to even longcast it anymore. Most of the time you can't.

[Gilraen]

...requests from North American players for penalties...

Sometimes I just want to move to another country...

[LemmingKingXXX]

inb4 pedantic comeback

[Astarica]

Edit: After a re-read. the daily bonus only seems to be going to exp, tome values are static. but this one line is very interesting for people leveling.

And this system would be self defeating, because we'd still have a shortage of tanks, except the few tanks you do have will now get to level 50 even faster because they're definitely always going to be the 'role in shortage' situation. I just don't see people rerolling as a tank because it's the fastest class to go from 1-50.

[Naberrie]

This sounds like its going to create more chaos to me. A random dungeon through DF which I'm sure will turn into "This dungeon again?? I'm out" which could also create LONGER queue times IMO.

Considering the rewards will be the same regardless of which dungeon you do, the fact that people are already willing to spam the same dungeons over and over and over, and how easy the low level dungeons are to pretty much sleep through, I don't see it being a problem. Only griping I could see would be, "Well, guess I don't have X skills."

[whilke]

Considering the rewards will be the same regardless of which dungeon you do, the fact that people are already willing to spam the same dungeons over and over and over, and how easy the low level dungeons are to pretty much sleep through, I don't see it being a problem. Only griping I could see would be, "Well, guess I don't have X skills."

Actually, it's probably going to still be faster to cap your tombs doing WP speed runs. Doing a lower level dungeon will take away all your tools used to do a fast run. Unless the tomb reward is crazy, no one is going to do a 40-60 min random low level dungeon for tombs.

[Seezur_Undies]

Thoughts? Don't say to stick to one character, I've tried telling her that. She doesn't like that.

I started doing that as well because i hate fate grinding. and find it easier to level that way and not get bored, but then again, i enjoy the story quest, but for the DF thing, yeah, its a bit ridiculous...

[Naberrie]

Actually, it's probably going to still be faster to cap your tombs doing WP speed runs. Doing a lower level dungeon will take away all your tools used to do a fast run. Unless the tomb reward is crazy, no one is going to do a 40-60 min random low level dungeon for tombs.

Good point. They should do something like give a weekly increase to tomes that only applies to ones gained through low level dungeons.

[Duelle]

duty roulette should solve this

The only way that would solve anything is if the roulette is set to favor low level dungeons and we have tons upon tons of people not leaving said dungeons and decide to stick around to the end.

Not to mention that the roulette bonus is once a day, which means I can queue and help the newbies run one (1) low level dungeon then go back to spamming AK/WP.

A random dungeon through DF which I'm sure will turn into "This dungeon again?? I'm out" which could also create LONGER queue times IMO.

This is also quite possible. Shouldn't ignore the possibility of having the old "WTF occulus/heroic halls of reflection again?!?! /leave" problem we had for a while in WoW.