New Characters, No Players

[Seirra_Lanzce]

how many people are playing the game? is not like there is only 100 players in the Duty Roullete...

[Roris]

They did do an emergency holiday sale for a reason after all, now just hope those new players stick with the game until late February-early March.

[EvokerKeii]

Unfortunately you and your friend are running into one of the core issues with this game.
In other games (excluding FFXI because that's a differen't beast entirely) you had a 1 class per character mechanic which meant if you wanted to play a new class you rolled a new character and had access to all the quests and missions and other one-time events that go hand in hand with a new character. In this game you have all the classes rolled into one character. It's not just a perk, it's designed so that classes can benefit from other class abilities (we'll get back to that in a moment). This creates an issue where the majority of people are going to focus on one character since that's the design of the game. However once you roll through the story and sidequests once, you lose that path of advancement for leveling other classes which isn't an issue in a one class per character situation.
What this does is creates the path of least resistance for players looking to level other classes, or to put it another way, the path with the most advancement for the least amount of work or risk vs reward. Since currently FATE grinding is the path of least resistance and a majority of players have already completed their main story quest path of advancement, everyone is currently doing that. That leaves less players to run dungeons because they're more risky and offer less reward. That is less people queuing up for dungeons and causing the average wait time to go up for everyone. Why run a dungeon when you can just get more EXP faster for less work through FATEs?
There is also another issue; there are less new people joining the game. This game had a rocky start and word of mouth travels fast. People don't want to join a game that has a lot of issues and this game certainly has plenty. One of the biggest issues for new people are server lockouts. Yes, they are STILL happening. When people can't create a new character on a server with their friends because character creation is locked on that server it's immediately discouraging. But that's another post entirely.
Getting back on topic; Squeenix is trying to fix the problem with people not running dungeons for 2.1 coming in a couple weeks. They're trying to add better rewards and more of a reason to get people into those dungeons and away from FATEs. That should help solve you and your friend's problem. For now, there's nothing you can really do about it.

Also to address a previous point I had made, I realize your friend likes creating new characters for each class and I also realize you don't want to hear anything about that but as a friendly guide I must say. The game was designed for people playing multiple classes on one character. From the job system that requires you have a 30 in one class and a 15 in a second, to cross class abilities that become vital later on that requires you leveling a different class entirely (looking at you Swiftcast), the only thing you're doing by separating them by different characters is hurting yourself. Swiftcast->Raise has become such a fundamentally vital tool that the people I play with refuse to even longcast it anymore. Most of the time you can't.

[Gilraen]

...requests from North American players for penalties...

Sometimes I just want to move to another country...

[Seezur_Undies]

...requests from North American players for penalties...

Sometimes I just want to move to another country...

I know that feeling.

I read this and was like holy crap there are new players who may not be able to progress thru dungeons so now on all languages I just que as a low level heal or tank almost every time 1-2 people's first time so yeah help them out XD

I do that on my healer sometime, and i even rolled a GLD and up lower instances in DF several times a day to try and help people through them when i can

[LemmingKingXXX]

inb4 pedantic comeback

[Seezur_Undies]

Thoughts? Don't say to stick to one character, I've tried telling her that. She doesn't like that.

I started doing that as well because i hate fate grinding. and find it easier to level that way and not get bored, but then again, i enjoy the story quest, but for the DF thing, yeah, its a bit ridiculous...

[Teon]

DF is not dead just on low level dungeons. It's dead on every dungeon, except ak speedfarmer one where everyone groups up expecially after the reset. Also, on some hours we have way lowered DF performance, because SE do maintenance to dungeon servers.
On peak time sometimes you can be lucky with "just" 15-30 minutes waiting.
Just hope roulette on 2.1 will help (until tomes reward is uber, or noone will give a damn )
If you wonder why, it's simple: fate grind is way faster leveling alts
(while in fact is the exact opposite: doing a dungeon multiple times with a preformed team without any queue time you level up way quicker then doing those retarded zergfates , now explain this to those zergs )

[Maxthunder]

Although I wont be using the Roulette, for my own reasons, I find it odd that this game isnt attracting new players. So what is the issue that new players are not coming to XIV?

I am sorry OP but I can see some doing the Roulette but not as many as Yoshi hopes for. Instead of having these dungeons tied to the story he could have done it a different way, but he didnt and now any new player must suffer. If you was on my server and you asked me for help I would but doing df in a random group is something I can not do.

[Little_Aussie_Mhigo]

I read this and was like holy crap there are new players who may not be able to progress thru dungeons so now on all languages I just que as a low level heal or tank almost every time 1-2 people's first time so yeah help them out XD