Player Run Companies: What do we want to see?

[Caidryn]

No one would ever use an instanced town and even if they did, it would take people away from the three major cities, essentially creating either instanced ghost-towns or ghost-city states. You cannot make instanced townships popular/meaningful without providing an incentive to go there.

The only way to make player-run towns work is by allowing them to be built as part of the persistent world, and even then there are many drawbacks (such as urban sprawl and a lack of incentive).

Perhaps if the market wards did not exist, player-run towns could develop as a response to the disorganised market wards, wherein each town would specialise in seling items relating to a certain corner of the market.

But again, there's no point to player towns in a game like this. In order for player-built villages to gain meaning in FFXIV, SE would first have to change their whole design philosophy (which at the moment is: turn this game into WoW ASAP).

But in saying that, I guess it could be a form of frivolous fun. Not everything in a game needs to have a meaning. People play The Sims after all, sometimes just to build houses. But again, if SE did include the ability to build your own house/village, the towns would need to be included as part of the peristent world so as not to dilute the population of the rest of the game world.

I can say that my group and I would certainly use an instanced town. It would get us off the streets of Ul'dah, and give us a nice warm place to sleep at night. That aside, why would you be worried about diluting the player populace in cities? I mean, it's bad if it feels truly and entirely barren, but I imagine these changes and this content would raise the overall population of the game dramatically.

That said, having loads of players standing around in the cities isn't exactly beneficial. Apart from spec reasons, like displaying less models, less load times, etc, there's the fact that the community, as it stands, is largely a silent one. Shouting in Ul'dah doesn't land you a deep, meaningful, or long conversation. (On Mysidia, at least) In fact, I ran a little social experiment where I tried to start the community talking by shouting and chatting in Ul'dah for like 2 weeks running. The overwhelming response were tells filled with hate, that I was abusing the shout feature by talking to people outside of my linkshell, and that I was taking advantage of their eyes against their will. The community doesn't seem to desire comraderie from strangers. It seems most people keep their chats to Linkshell.

Which would make instanced cities, where you hang out with your company, exactly the same as the cities are now, just with less character models afk in random places.