Eureka Orthos is a Dead Queue in NA

[Striker44]

But this game is supposed to respect our time, isn't it? So how come we need to play at prime time, just to get higher chance to find a group? 4PM should definitely not be some dead zone, I'm not from NA, but I bet you can find groups for other content just fine even at that time.

A game "respecting your time" means there isn't a perceived need to constantly be logging in for significant stretches day after day in order to remain "competitive" with your fellow players. FFXIV is one of the best games out there at respecting players' time in that regard with the weekly caps on most things allowing you to log in whenever suits you, and even if you take substantial breaks from the game, gil is relatively easy to come by and every couple patches new sellable crafted gear is introduced that lets any max level player jump right in with current content.

4:00PM Eastern Time is definitely not prime time in any way, shape, or form. Remember that the primary demographic for MMO's today is no longer teenagers, college kids, and recent grads. It's now mainly people in their 30's and 40's with families and full-time careers. As someone else mentioned, at 4PM Eastern time even the east coast folks are still most likely at work, let alone the rest of the main NA timezones. "Primetime" for NA is more like 8-11pm if you're going off Eastern time. It is a testament, though, to the size of the playerbase that so much other, non-niche content does run perfectly fine even at off hours.

Strange, in almost any other MMO or game in general that I play, there aren't dead zones like that regardless of what time it is.

At least for me, most other online games I play don't really have niche content. There's only a small number of queue-based options, period, so with everyone funneled into only a few places, it naturally keeps things going. FFXIV is unique in the amount of niche-style queues that exist. (And heck, head over to the Destiny 2 forums as one example and see how even a game with that smaller number of queues still ends up with "dead zones".)