Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
Because that is how gamers play games. They login, do new DLC, then leave. Just watch any friend/user list on Steam, Discord. A new game or its DLC releases, they play it for maybe a week, then they move on. Games are just FOMO.
:: "Why health care? People just die. They get born, hang for a bit, and then poof. Life is just transient. Accept it, stop asking for any extended access, and move on."

More directly:

Gamers shifting from game to new game can be a statistical trend without remotely precluding value from extended lifespan of games. By your logic here, there'd be no value in Steam holding onto games and spending the server costs to hold the data for them or allow their downloads past their on-release prime. There'd be no value in the likes of Good Old Games or certainly zero use of torrents for, say, emulatable copies of old console games (the old FF games among them). There'd be no players of the original CoD: Modern Warfare from the moment the original MW2 came out, let alone the MW remake. There'd be none still playing Starcraft in this day and age. And yet, evidence to the contrary abounds.

People don't solely play games when they are maximally popular. They play games also when something about the (idea of the) game appeals to them enough to acquire and play it. For a great many people, the game's broader popularity is damn near irrelevant. And it's generally worthwhile to tweak content or infrastructure, therefore, to be run even past something's heyday, or, where already runnable, to give it the occasional impetus for a bit more player count.

If you do Ishgard Restoration 6 years later, probably most others aren't doing it and the "fun" crowd that was there no longer is.
That in itself is fine --as long as it's still there and usable despite its later-day player counts instead of, say, facing requirements of 24 crafters soon into the experience-- especially so long as its development time is fruitfully reused later.

You are talking about making 12 years worth of content and zones still getting bustling with hundreds of players no matter which content you pickup.
You're really doubling down on the strawmen...

No. It is impossible to make each and every piece of content "bustle" with "hundreds of players" each in a game as expansive and in decline as XIV. Scaling tweaks to make old content more enjoyable and accessible and incentive structures to make it more worth the rare revisit as new blood reach said content, on the other hand, is very doable.

Making it so content can be run without needing a party of friends and/or a queue of 20+ minutes even when fed by roulettes... does not require making each and every piece of content to ever exist mandatory to complete weekly.
My point is that you need to give people a reason to go back to any of this 12+ year old content. Otherwise, why would they, when they did it already?
...So, exactly what the OP and others were asking for in terms of allowing for the incentives to be more lastingly worthwhile/compatible... which you then treated as purely a waste?

You also can't necessarily make a roulette for a Field Operation or Cosmic Exploration.
Why would player-funneling or -contiguity necessarily have to be via a roulette? That's one example of player-funneling that we already have. The OP is asking for more -- more than just what features or implementations thereof that we already have for tempering the decline in player count and, just as importantly, its more quantized impact on how that content can be played.

Again most things can be done by players in the future still. I was just saying that it's mostly going to be a quiet experience (ie. 1-8 players) because players did the day1 rush thing that they do with all games.
The post specifically refers to areas that presently require 24+ players. A significant portion of gameplay hours available to what would otherwise appeal to players completing things at their own pace, which becomes increasingly important --especially if one wants to feel like they're not always merely in "pre-game" until current content-- as the game gets more and more expanded (the exploratory missions of Eureka, Bozja, OC prominent among them), is currently bottlenecked by those requirements.

It would require first allowing such content to be done with 1-8 players before your response could be pertinent to the thread. Otherwise, the content indeed becomes effectively impossible to complete after a certain point. The less tempered the decline, the sooner its development hours become impossible to leverage beyond that Day 1 / Week 1 rush.

most things in this game end up being soloable, including Savage, dungeons, DD, variants and relics.
...Soloing level 60 Savage dungeons as a level 100 is not content in any meaningful sense of the word: it's a visual progression with glamour drops. A cutscene with rewards, given a bit of "walk here, then there" prior would about as equally count as content. Nor is soloing a DD remotely the same experience as playing through it in a party; there's a reason the first gets leaderboards.

Yes, but it won't replicate 144 people in Eureka or 72 people in Occult or Cosmic.
No one's asked for it fully replicate that. Only one person has even asked for NPC fill-ins at all, with others just considering it "better than nothing".

But there's a difference between, on one side, the vibe of the content changing as it goes from a FATE/CE train rush to a single Full Party moving together through a zone and grabbing what nearby FATEs they can survive while leveling together, or even the maximum level among players and mobs, both, being reduced to broaden the portion of players each little group can play with and/or mob-kill experience increasing to build that experience more around self-paced play now that the FOMO waves have paced anyways... and, on the other, the end of said content being essentially impossible with fewer than 24 players at a time where most are level 120 (or 100 with 20 "Merit Ranks" or what have you) and that content sees barely a dozen players at a time.

Just as there's a difference between players being "forced to re-do each and every bit of past content weekly" and a rotating schedule of bonus rewards to funnel the community in ways that'd allow for newer players to see enough activity in past content to engage with it and for veterans to enjoyably revisit what different content forms may appeal to them more than just what's visible at max level.