Early Heavensward areas on Behemoth were...empty?!

[DragonSlayer45]

Uhm you can't go to northern thanalan til 43-45.. So if you'renot doing western highlands..you're running dungeons.

What are you talking about? I see people in NT as low as Level 35 and as high as 54. You're free to go to NT as soon as you start the game...

[Lemuria]

Uhm you can't go to northern thanalan til 43-45.. So if you'renot doing western highlands..you're running dungeons.

There's not a lot of logic in that statement. For starters, there's nothing physically stopping you from entering the area (unlike the Western Highlands, which requires MSQ completion), and secondly there's nothing stopping you from STAYING in Northern Thanalan after you hit 50 or beyond.

Level sync means that it's still decent for XP no matter how high level you get.

[AureliusDraconium]

Aside from hunts and gathering there is not much to do in the HW areas if you have already used most of your side quests to level your main to 60 like what I did when HW launched. Now on my alt classes i run dungeons or run fates in northern thanalan still. The areas have been dead for the longest time. Some of this has to do with the fates and how still grinding fates in Northern Thanalan is still more appealing than running fates in the new zones since the fates are closer together and you have a easier time following the player mobs from fate to fate because they are on foot. Also when HW launched the fates in the new areas gave less exp than in northern thanalan, player base caught on to this and no one touched the fates in the new areas. SE gave them a exp buff shortly after but the damage has been done...

[AureliusDraconium]

Any ideas why that is? Is the game dying as a whole? Which servers are the most populated (does anyone know this? Haha)

Well there was a extended time for the release of patch 3.1 which played a part in it. The hype of heavensward died off a bit which happens with a lot of mmos. Also there has been a mass exodus of players to servers such a gilgamesh which is the most populated alongside Balmung since people are looking for raid groups and also since it is a highly suggested server when someone asks where to transfer. A lot of people from the primal Datacenter recently transfered to the Aether Datacenter since primal has had some duty finder issues. There have been a lot of factors which have contributed to player populations in the end.

[Mikedizzy]

In my opinion the reason is simple...all the content that people do is "qued up for". The "Open World" content is not very popular to most people, let's take a look:
1. Hunts...most would consider this a pain in the ass and a near waste of time.
2. Gathering...people get what they need and get out.
3. FATES...only popular in some areas, mainly HInterlands and N.Thanalan still. Dungeons just way better right now.
New Anima Weapon should breathe life back into the open world again...we shall see.

[Pluvia]

There's been a mass exodus of raiders to gilg so no real surprise the PF are mostly empty on a lot of servers

[Colorful]

On one of the most populated servers and the areas are just about empty, but this applies to just about every zone that isn't a hotspot. You'll see the occasional passerby but that's it, and to be expected when there's close to zero reason for going back to the old areas.

[CrimsonThunder]

If it's people you're looking for, find your servers hang out spot. For us on Odin it's Limsa. Hell, even Ishgard is dead now.

[Roegadyn_Bear]

I don't feel as if though Behemoth is dead... but then again, I dance around on my rock in Idyllshire and blow kisses at random Roegadyn men... so what do I know?

[Gunspec]

Players complained about enemies not being "dangerous" enough, so SE boosted enemy HP and damage considerably. Now it's extremely difficult and fairly unrewarding to do fates if you aren't in a sizable group, and fates quickly scale to those large groups. You'd need at least 16-24 people running fates in a HW zone to make them equal in difficulty to the fates in 2.0 zones. And since its unlikely to find groups like that, no one even bothers with fates anymore.

Combine this with dungeons now giving enormous amounts of xp, to the extent that 3 enemies in Gubal Library are worth more xp than a 7 minute fate in Azys Lla. Of the past 4 classes I've leveled to 60, I've only participated in perhaps 2 or 3 fates in Heavensward zones.

You can't even reasonably farm 3.0 open world mobs for materials, since it takes 3-4 rotations to kill the average mob, and low drop rates can mean that you will kill 5 or 6 enemies before seeing a single item. It's much smarter to just send combat retainers for materials while you run dungeons.

I know I've been playing FFXIV just as much as before, but my gaming habits never send me out into 3.0 zones due to these "dangerous" enemies. The latest 3.1 boost to dungeon XP was the final shot in the head, because they didn't buff the xp rewards from open world content a single bit. Hopefully they'll be smart enough to utilize the open world with relic quest on Tuesday, and not just give players one more reason to queue for dungeons and diadem.