So, pretty dead lately....

[adn]

Games these days can't make dungeons interesting or gun enough for folks to not mind running them for 8 hours a day, every day.

Never mind that was the average BRD run....

I played through much of vanilla and nobody ran all of BRD. People did Emperor speed runs because melee DPS wanted his trinket, or attunement runs for MC. I cannot recall a single time aside from VERY early on when people actually did full runs of BRD. That place is second only to Gnomeregan for terrible design. And I'm assuming those "8 hours of dungeons" factors in the hours you spend yelling in city chat for party members...

WoW had a lot of fun dungeon ideas early on, and I always felt like they should have kept stuff like 10-man Scholo/Strat and 15-man UBRS in the game instead of homogenizing EVERY dungeon into a 5-man. It's better for accessibility but it chipped away at some of the flavor the dungeons had. (Sacrificing flavor for accessibility has been overarching theme in WoW's history)

[Nadirah]

To be fair, most of the reason for that, is that SE did really poor advertising outside Japan. Inside Japan they had promo events, tv ads and the like. Outside? We got like 1 commercial in 2002 that came on maybe once or twice and never really showed back up again. There were also very few ads for it online, unlike a certain mmo (WoW), that force fed you ads daily on practically every page you went to.
You can release anything and say it's not popular if you don't advertise for it.

FFXI predates WoW, but does *not* predate EverQuest, which got even less advertising.

I didn't know about it(and I was a pretty big pc gamer) until 2001 and in college, and it'd been out 2 years.

[Nadirah]

@adn, were you Horde by chance?

Alliance Onyxia attunement required an escort quest(Jailbreak!) That was a guaranteed 3 hour wipefest because that NPC was an idiot with an aggro rafius the size of Texas.

And I quite often did full runs, my fastest were closer to 6 hours.

I was 5 Manning scholo before hard player cap and stratholme when it was wall to wall, five pack pulls was great. 45 minute, 5 man Baron runs were hard in blues... ><

And 8 hours includes yelling? Nah. I was a healer. Lol

[Akiza]

The reason why players get bored is because people have short attentioin spans and there are other games to play. Also Final Fantasy XIV got caught in the always online era so every game has a massively online component re branding MMO's. Look at Grand Theft Auto Online which is essentialy in MMO it has sinlge player elements with multiple players sharing the same game world. This game is going to have to embrace single player gameplay and mechanics from the Final Fantasy to make it unique.

[Nadirah]

The reason why players get bored is because people have short attentioin spans and there are other games to play. Also Final Fantasy XIV got caught in the always online era so every game has a massively online component re branding MMO's. Look at Grand Theft Auto Online which is essentialy in MMO it has sinlge player elements with multiple players sharing the same game world. This game is going to have to embrace single player gameplay and mechanics from the Final Fantasy to make it unique.

If I didn't have RL friends playing here, I probably wouldn't have stayed long enough to find a fc.

No chat channels, the world feels dead. Players might as well be NPCs. At least in other games, general and level chats kep it feeling multiplayer.

[Altera]

If servers sometimes feel dead, doesnt mean it is dead.
Humans are packanimals, they do not want to stray from the pack, AKA they dont want to do the first move or do something "out of the ordinary"

I saw a program where they tested this out where they had 1 person come into a room which was full of other actors that was told to not move/exit building when the Fire Alarm went off, and shockingly, most test persons did not move until another person did. Even when they poured in smoke into the room. This has actually ended up killing people many times.

So my tip is, if want to get in touch with people, make the first move
I have done this very often to random players I have met and usually ended up in 1-2 hour chats even and added to friendslists
Dont be shy, stick yourself out there ^^

[adn]

@adn, were you Horde by chance?

Yep, I've always been Horde. The Horde Ony quest line was nowhere near as cool as the Alliance one because it was missing all of the stuff about Onyxia infiltrating Stormwind. With Horde you didn't have an escort quest, but you did have to find Rexxar in Desolace which was always fun because he had a huge patrol range that went all the way across the zone.

I do sorta miss those days but I also don't miss grinding all the time just to cover repair costs and oh god the PVP grind.

[Ryaz]

Bored right now because all there really is left to do for me is grind. Either I grind the two Expert dungeons for Tomes or I grind my gathering classes. It's why I've been playing Disblo 3 again. It's the same grind, but without the downtime and I can stop whenever I feel like it. At this point, I'm basically killing time until Fallout 4 comes out.

[Nadirah]

Yep, I've always been Horde. The Horde Ony quest line was nowhere near as cool as the Alliance one because it was missing all of the stuff about Onyxia infiltrating Stormwind. With Horde you didn't have an escort quest, but you did have to find Rexxar in Desolace which was always fun because he had a huge patrol range that went all the way across the zone.

I do sorta miss those days but I also don't miss grinding all the time just to cover repair costs and oh god the PVP grind.

You had to kill elites and all sorts of other random crap for it. I know, I did that one too, but started as Alliance.

We spent a LOT more time than should have ever possibly be spent in BRD as a result. :/

[Roegadyn_Bear]

Yep, I've always been Horde. The Horde Ony quest line was nowhere near as cool as the Alliance one because it was missing all of the stuff about Onyxia infiltrating Stormwind. With Horde you didn't have an escort quest, but you did have to find Rexxar in Desolace which was always fun because he had a huge patrol range that went all the way across the zone.

I do sorta miss those days but I also don't miss grinding all the time just to cover repair costs and oh god the PVP grind.

I remember tanking Upper Blackrock Spire with my Orc Shaman. Ah, the days of Shaman tanking... how brief you were.