Is anyone else not really enjoying themselves?

[Connor]

FFXIV has not been this since 1.0. Any feeling you had that this was the case comes from inexperience with the game and your own expectations with the genre. Even in ARR there really was very little to do in the game outside of very non-persistent instances. It's a visual novel with a raid sim attached.

If you want a big, multiplayer, persistent world, play Guild Wars 2 or Final Fantasy XI. I'd be thrilled to get you started in either because actually playing them in the open world with other people is a lot of fun and not just hand-holding from point A to point B.

Even 1.0 wasn’t an entirely ‘open, persistent world’, not besides extremely early on in the game’s lifespan. It had its instanced dungeons too, I think Cutter’s Cry and Dzemael Darkhold were two such ones.

I don’t think FFXIV is ever going to be a place for an ‘open persistent world’ like certain other mmos

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Even 1.0 wasn’t an entirely ‘open, persistent world’, not besides extremely early on in the game’s lifespan. It had its instanced dungeons too, I think Cutter’s Cry and Dzemael Darkhold were two such ones.

That's true, but I haven't played any MMO completely absent of private instances, going all the way back to the early 2000s.

Remember, in 1.0, levequests in the open world were a feature they pushed as a selling point on the back of the box. You were intended to be out there exploring and playing with friends and meeting people doing them. The game had a lot of faults, but it was certainly a lot more of an MMORPG than 2.0+ is.

[TaleraRistain]

That's true, but I haven't played any MMO completely absent of private instances, going all the way back to the early 2000s.

You'd have to go back to EverQuest from 1999 to 2002. The Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion kind of blew our minds. We were used to camp and grind and contested open world content before that.