Quote Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato View Post
Try joining one of them and see how it is when, out of 150+ people, only <10 are online at primetime.

And while one can certainly opt to play old content, or make do with what we have, players just simply aren't in the mood for that. That's why they take breaks for months at a time.
All of this is a symptom of the truth, which is that if you ever used Steam, you would notice that all of the people on a friends list usually play a game or DLC that just came out for a few days, then they finish it and stop playing. When an MMO releases a new patch, they are usually playing it for a few days, then they play something else. This is so easy to see on Steam that once you've seen it, you understand exactly why SE makes patch content that can be finished within a few days. Because most gamers will only consume it for a few days and move onto the next game.

We might as well also ask the question why a lot of content only lasts 20 minutes. That's really simple as well. People come home and have 2 hours to play in the evening. They don't want to be asked to be in a raid for 8 hours as if they don't have other things in their life. That's unfortunate for people that actually don't have other things in their life, but as far as I can tell most people do.

Playing just one game like this all of the time is not something most people do but if we really want to, this is what all the achievements and lengthy grinds are for. As I showed in my previous post, all these free companies have no trouble setting up events to do this short but farmable content and the scheduling can help people with limited time get the content done.

It's not normal for the game director to tell us to play a different game.
Maybe not, but because Yoshi-P has designed the game around most people's casual gaming habits, he knows that every patch will get people to login for a few days and that he won't lose those players forever because he's designed it to work for them.

It's time for Square Enix to fix that by providing more incentives for group content instead of making everything single-player like the shareholders tell them.
Last time I checked, most of the content in the game was designed for a party except quests.