A moving/dynamic zone would be cool (e.g. a ship or train)

[Azurymber]

We had that in V1.0, that was the only way to get to or from Limsa Lominsa. I'd like to see it return, but unless you can fish on it, it probably would get no use. There were also airship landing moors in V1.00 that I never saw get used.

I don't remember either of those actually having a trip or zone associated with it?
There were airships & ships but weren't they just an instant transport?
I only remember there being an instanced ship during the limsa intro.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't remember either of those actually having a trip or zone associated with it?
There were airships & ships but weren't they just an instant transport?
I only remember there being an instanced ship during the limsa intro.

The ferry was instanced, yes, much like those in WoW, but with a long-running "in transit" instance as well. I remember players frequently requesting player-count-based random encounters and unique fishing types be made available over the in transit instance, but can't actually even recall if regular fishing was available therefrom.
The city airships were indeed instant, and nothing was ever done with the gridanian airship landings.

[KisaiTenshi]

The ferry was instanced, yes, much like those in WoW, but with a long-running "in transit" instance as well. I remember players frequently requesting player-count-based random encounters and unique fishing types be made available over the in transit instance, but can't actually even recall if regular fishing was available therefrom.
The city airships were indeed instant, and nothing was ever done with the gridanian airship landings.

Yep, I remember running into one of the Gridanian airship landings during the beta for V1.0 an patiently waiting around to see if anything came. Nothing did. I did use the ferry several times however as I made beta characters on all starting cities so I could see the opening cutscenes and quests.

When I later played Archeage I kinda wanted that kind of airship/taxi/ship system where there is just a piece of transport you can get on. However you also have to understand why these existed in Archeage. One of Archeage's core game concepts is trading materials. So you'd buy something from the guy in the desert city, and then sell it to the guy in the port city, and such. So the most direct way of doing this was via the airships, however the airships also moved through PvP areas, so the second you hit a PvP spot, the other players would kill everyone. Now I do want to point out something that is more funny about this. You could leverage the PvP against the other faction. So what you would do is hide in the airship docking area of the enemy faction and wait for someone with a backpack to wait for a ship to come. Wait for the ship to come, sneak onboard, and then once you're away from the dock, jack their stuff. Once you got something jacked, you also would likely have the ship to yourself. That's when you kill everyone who boards at the next stop, repeat until you get to the closest fixed route to an area you could sell the packs.

That is literately how that game was supposed to be played, though more emphasis was placed on ship warfare. Players didn't like losing their ships, so they'd unsummon them at first sight of the enemy.

Now that kind of stuff I always found a bit more interesting than the "open world pvp" aspect. Defend your deliveries from bandits (AI or PC) in transit. You can't just teleport with a package, you have to physically take it from NPC to NPC. I didn't stick around archeage long enough to see any parser wars that would have made sneaking impossible, but suffice it to say, I think this is still something that would justify these things existing in FFXIV.

Let's say that, the custom deliveries that already exist in the game was expanded to include taking crates or backpacks from one area to another. Because this game doesn't really have any kind of openworld PvP, there is no risk of player bandits. Basically we already have one version of this with Vase off. So to complete a delivery, you have to complete one of three things:

1) Deliver the small package, on foot, the slow and safest route, with only regular overworld mobs to deal with, being attacked drops the pack, and the pack can be picked up by other players should the player who initially picked it up, teleport, use a mount, board a chocobo taxi, or use any other variation of quick-travel (including the tri-city airships.) All mobs will attack players carrying specific things, and players must drop the pack to attack back. The best strategy is to bring at least a friend to take care of any mobs. Carrying a pack across a zone boundary change will lead to instanced fights, depending on the value of the item being taken.

2) Deliver the medium packages by cart (behaves like a mount), a faster means, but it will be targeted by bandits during zone-boundary changes. So in effect it adds instanced fights to zone boundary crossings that you can not solo. You need a party. Or you can try to solo and are gauranteed to lose some of your stuff. Zone boundary changes on a cart will sync to the cart/goods level.

3) Deliver the small, medium, or large packages by airship, ferry or caravan. This leans back to what the OP was asking. Where there would be fixed transportation on a schedule. So one of these routes would be from some place like Quarrymill, that you'd have to take on foot or cart to gridania, and then at the airship/ferry port you and X many other players in the port area would be transported to an alternate version of the airship, which is a larger cargo ship. So this ship would also behave a bit like "hamlet defense", where there would be waves of sea/sky pirates depending on the total value of goods on board. Between each wave, the ship can be repaired by DoH jobs. Players are free to not repair the ship, but if the ship's durability reaches zero, it crashes and all goods are lost. Where as pirates can just straight up steal goods if left undefended. Unlike other duties, failing these duties does not get a do-over.

The ideas above are partially inspiried by how this mechanic exists in archeage or mabinogi, but really those games had various issues that made those things a lot less fun than they should be:
- Archeage's Openworld PvP areas would pretty much guarantee you lost your cargo, because the flight mechanic allowed players to glide onto moving transport. There was no NPC based bandits.
- Mabinogi's version of this would feature AI bandits, and harder ones the higher level cargo you took. However since the bandits spawned in the regular areas of the game, having an entire party of strong players was the only practical way to do it, and it was a faceroll that way.

I'm sure this entire trading thing came from another game in a better way (probably from EVE) , but suffice it to say, it would give a reason for these areas to exist beyond just sight-seeing.

[Shurrikhan]

Snip

So much of this sounds like what 1.x was pushing towards, pre-Yoshida....

And yeah, I'd love to see stuff like that, so long as the open world, and its purpose to XIV, could be similarly beefed up.