Something needs to be done about Party Finder outside of Aether

[Thurmnmurmn]

That is exactly what annihilated any sense of community in WoW. No thanks.

I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons why that happened to wow (I never even knew wow was a mega server now).

But how would this ruin the sense of community? You act as if FFXIV actually creates community's in game (they don't). Everything community wise is driven via discord outside of the game.

[CidHeiral]

I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons why that happened to wow (I never even knew wow was a mega server now).

WoW isn't one big merged server, it's clusters of servers connected together. Throughout all of the game's ups and downs, server communities were alive and well until connecting servers and sharding came around.

Of course that's assuming their populations weren't dead, but the solution there would be to just merge them into entirely new servers as most MMOs do so they can form a new identity and community. Even FFXIV has done this in the past, that's how my own server Hyperion came into existence.

But how would this ruin the sense of community?

On a normal server if you're an asshole you get a reputation for being an asshole. You see this and that person hanging around their favorite spots. You form friendships with people you see regularly as you would in real life. I have a long list of friends I've made on Hyperion/Primal exactly that way.

On a megaserver you quickly realize it's almost impossible to see the same person twice. You lose all the little things that make a server feel alive because every player you meet is just another faceless body in the meat grinder. Everyone around you becomes a temporary means to an end, they may as well be NPCs. It's a very soulless experience.

I played WoW from vanilla beta onward for many, many years and witnessed all of this happen in real time. Back in the day I made friends on the opposite faction that I had no way of even communicating with, just from running into them frequently out in the world. I would go to Ironforge and /shout to announce my presence and they would come outside to a little clearing where we would duel each other. All that came to an end with the connected realms.

This is a lot of why people wanted classic servers for WoW. They missed that sense of community.

You act as if FFXIV actually creates community's in game (they don't).

FFXIV has a wonderful community that is very alive and easy to engage with, current content drought woes notwithstanding. If that hasn't been your experience that sounds like a you problem.

Everything community wise is driven via discord outside of the game.

Discord certainly helps organize certain things but to say people only ever meet and interact in Discord and not the actual game is absurd.

If anything I think making it a mega server would bring more life to the game.

It has the exact opposite effect.

Right now only city's are populated. With a mega server at least you would have a better chance of actually seeing someone in the world for a change.

Zones in WoW are just as dead as this game, and that's factoring in all the little world events they have going on to motivate players to be out there. It's just the nature of MMOs. Even if you added fabulous events and rewards to every zone (which I would love), people would grind them, get what they want, and go back to being AFK in their favorite city.

You may say "but they would be alive for that little while!" to which I would say that's already the case. Join a hunt train, an S rank kill, make a FATE party, host/join an RP event, etc. There's an FC on my server that hosts RP get togethers at towns out in the world all the time.

Personally I'd love to see all cross world cross DC stuff gone for good. Let worlds develop their own personalities again. And yes I do play on Dynamis regularly and know well how much this would hurt short term. Long term things would spread out and settle into something workable. People are just too impatient to wait though so it will never happen.

I don't think the worlds have lost their personality overall but that is certainly the case with Dynamis. More accurately it was never given a chance to develop one to begin with because everyone bails to another DC to do everything. If DC travel didn't exist each server could have slowly grown its own community like any other server. The irony is if everyone on Dymanis stopped DC traveling tomorrow they would have plenty of people on the DC to run content without any issues.