Quote Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul View Post
I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.
That would create more activity in chat, but not really in the 'zone', as people would just mob the specific NPC/entrance and the rest of the zone would end up dead.

Unfortunately, with the current system, you have pretty much one option to get people "playing" in the open world; make content there far more lucrative than anywhere else. In ARR, people did FATEs because they were the most rewarding content type at that time; after everything was "balanced" and dungeons became more desirable, FATEs went downhill. The spreading of the population across more zones has just made that (appear) even worse.

Other than that, I suspect the only way you can really forcibly liven up the zones would be to essentially kill the game; remove everything convenient. Remove teleporting and Chocobo porters, make it so you have to preselect a mount before going anywhere and give it stamina, give players more "realistic" sprint stamina themselves and require them to make camp to heal up, make all ingredients scarce and require them to be gathered from "regions" on the map rather than nodes (so a lot of "You begin mining, but find nothing at this spot"), etc. And then make the map 20-30 times bigger. Basically, take 1.0, then make it even more of a headache.

Players will only do a thing en masse if they are absolutely forced to, or its the most profitable use of time.