how big did ff11 area grow before and after all the expansion?

[kyuven]

Are you saying "not even close" as in it's not the smallest MMO on the market? Please tell me one that is smaller.

I spend 90% of my time sitting at my FC house, or sitting in The Gold Saucer, or sitting in Mor Dhona while I queue for instances. There is really no use to the open world outside of gathering and hunts.

There are a number of MMOs that use nothing but instanced content with fewer mapsets than we have access to. Guild Wars, at launch and until it gained expansions, was no bigger than XIV is now. EQ2 was the same way, with only about 12 zones at launch. They are all now FAR bigger, but that's after YEARS of content. FFXIV: ARR is only about 2 years old and is just now getting their first expansion.
Gathering, hunts, the road to 50, class quests, job quests, FATEs, treasure hunts, regular hunts, leves, other quests...the game gets a lot of traffic through the zones we DO have. It's rare for a zone to be empty for very long in this game.
Contrast games with OMGHUGE numbers of zones, where it can be MONTHS between player visitations.
SE is currently very good at making use of the space they have, whereas the design mentality for XI and XIV 1.0 was "MAKE MANY HUUUGE ZOOOOONES!"
With very little in them.
Allow me to provide an example:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ea...pa_Desert/Maps
This is Eastern Altepa Desert.
It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point, which are largely irrelevant now.
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.
EQ1 had problems like this too, ironically also with a few desert zones. They responded by merging them some years back.