The World: so Big so Beautiful... But yet so empty

[Alleo]

And people will still not go there. It may be novel at first, but even the people that enjoy it will start to keep away over time, and most people will just flat out not care unless there's loot involved.

Riddles are a great example of one-time-use content unless they have a writer change them up on a daily basis. Jumping puzzles too, to a lesser extent (unless you add dailies for them a la GW2 or gathering nodes at the end of them [expect rage]). The content would need to be truly dynamic to incentivize people to do it continue to do it on its own merit, and even then may need significant rewards to maintain interest.

Lets be honest, there can simply be no content that can keep the zones active for all players forever. You always will have more active ones and those that are barely visited but at least some changes could mean a bit more activity for at least some time. Its not for everyone but at least those that enjoy a truly alive world will like it. I mean they have lots of minions which they could use to repopulate the zones as normal animals. And making the herbivore ones passive should probably also not be that big of a chance. They are already quite lucky that they can use a lot of monster models from FF11 and from other FF games and also have quite a lot of recolors of existing ones in the new zones. So they could use the time that other MMOs need to fully create new monster to create more wildlife. Heck most small critters could be copied all over the zones with different colors which would make it feel more alive.

Yes in the end you will not visit it all the time even if the world feels more alive and riddles and stuff like that is a one time thing. But these could be at least some small steps to make it more lively next to fates and hunts. And maybe if they add more smaller things like that over the time you will have more things to do in there. And if they dont have the best weapon behind it or other incentives like that, than people will not feel forced to do them thus only those that are interested in these things will do it. Which is a better game experience for at least those players.