Need to address the Eureka in the room.

[Kalise]

You have thousands of players online, but you only interact with a couple of them from time to time or even solo your way through it. Can we call it an MMO?

Technically, you have games like Global Agenda that called themselves "MMO's" because it literally had a bunch of people standing around in a city-like "HUB" before queuing into small instances with 5-10 players.

That was their entire content. They still were called "MMO" because of the afking with a bunch of people around aspect

You rarely see group activities going on in the open world maps unless it's a hunt or a fate like Ixion. Why? because there's really no need to have any groups in order to do any content in the open world. You can easily solo 90% of the contents there.

No, that's not the reason why there's no group activities going on in the open world.

The reason why there's no group activities going on in the open world is because there's no rewards that are relevant in the open world outside Hunts and Ixion.

Literally, it's better for every single thing you can possibly get from the open world, to just spam duties while standing around in a city (Much like in Global Agenda )

If you take a look at the past of FFXIV, back when duty spamming was less rewarding, what happened? You'd see tons of people FATE Training for experience in the open world.

Why? Was it because the FATEs where not soloable at the time? No, it was because the rewards of grinding FATEs for experience was better than farming duties and teaming up with others made the farming more efficient.

THAT'S the issue at hand with content. For some reason, SE has been keeping Roulettes and Duty spam as the most effective way of earning experience, gear, tomes, seals and whatever else. I can only imagine because of their arbitrary decision to shoehorn duties into the MSQ so that people need to complete them somehow and thus need people to be queueing into roulettes to populate them (Such as the MSQ 8 mans)

As such it means that the overworld has no notable rewards, so there's no reason for anyone to actually group up to farm stuff.

Like, BLU created a reason for people to group in the overworld so you saw a bunch of BLU leveling parties because farming in a party > farming solo.

For everything else, it's pure crap.

Hopefully with the trust system, they'll be able to shift some focus away from Duty spam without affecting people trying to get through the duties for the MSQ. So they can put more emphasis onto overworld content, thus get more people farming FATEs or chaining enemies for experience (You know, exactly what Eureka is made out of)