Eureka Orthos is a Dead Queue in NA

[Alleluia]

Honestly, I think the main reason Eureka Orthos is so dead is just that it's out of the way.

With Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, the entrance is a few feet from the nearest aetheryte. You can zone in and queue in about 2-3 seconds, plus whatever the loading time was to teleport to the aetheryte. Contrast that with Eureka Orthos, where you have to teleport to Mor Dhona, fly over to Syrcus Tower, click-enter the Syrcus Tower map, which causes another loading screen, and then walk for about 5-6 seconds before you can talk to the NPC to enter the Deep Dungeon itself.

Trusts also clearly cut into it as a resource for EXP Grinding, since they're available on demand and are effectively effortless content, whereas Deep Dungeons require some degree of situational awareness even in matched parties.

My point being that they should be a bit more convenient to enter, since their Path of Least Resistance alternative is too.

Yeah, adding deed dungeons to the DF somehow would probably be useful.

[SnowVix]

p much title.
i tried transferring around at 4pm EST (prime time hours usually for all forms of content) to Aether, Crystal and then even Dynamis before returning home to Primal, the 21-30 queue doesn't pop anywhere and now i've been sitting in it for over half an hour on my home world.
i just want to grind aetherpool to solo it, so i don't mind doing it solo but its a bit annoying that there's a soft lock on silver chests at certain aetherpool values on lower floors when the content is this dead.
Even heaven on high wasn't this brutally devoid of life during Stormblood, and that expansion even had to compete with the exploration zone Eureka and the first two Ultimates ever all during a savage tier.
So now this expansion has even less content AND less players doing it? How depressing.

4 PM EST on a Monday is the literal opposite of prime hours. East coast office workers are still in the office for another hour yet, to say nothing of going further west. Plus Monday is the day before reset, so a lot of people have already finished capping tomes and are just coasting.

[Deo14]

4 PM EST on a Monday is the literal opposite of prime hours. East coast office workers are still in the office for another hour yet, to say nothing of going further west. Plus Monday is the day before reset, so a lot of people have already finished capping tomes and are just coasting.

But this game is supposed to respect our time, isn't it? So how come we need to play at prime time, just to get higher chance to find a group? 4PM should definitely not be some dead zone, I'm not from NA, but I bet you can find groups for other content just fine even at that time.

[Raikai]

Yeah... Honestly, Eureka Orthos was the biggest letdown for me, but maybe because I was really looking forward to the return of the Deep Dungeon feature.

For starters, I'd rather have the setting being somewhere completely new. Do we really need yet another story element involving the Crystal Tower?

But I would get past that, if the actual feature wasn't a near (no pun intended) clone of the other Deep Dungeons. I was really expecting something way more innovative with the structure this time, maybe something more maze-like with huge horizontal levels. Pomanders once again? The demiclones are actually really nice, but the rest didn't have meaningful changes. No wonder why the queues are this long. It's just not as interesting because once more, Squeenix rests on the 'safe formula'.

If they intend to spend resources in a new 7.0 Deep Dungeon and repeat the same thing, I'd rather have an Exploratory Zone again.

[Iscah]

Honestly, I think the main reason Eureka Orthos is so dead is just that it's out of the way.

With Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, the entrance is a few feet from the nearest aetheryte. You can zone in and queue in about 2-3 seconds, plus whatever the loading time was to teleport to the aetheryte. Contrast that with Eureka Orthos, where you have to teleport to Mor Dhona, fly over to Syrcus Tower, click-enter the Syrcus Tower map, which causes another loading screen, and then walk for about 5-6 seconds before you can talk to the NPC to enter the Deep Dungeon itself.

Actually, you just talk to the guy at the Revenant's Toll aetheryte plaza (where Koh used to hang out) and get teleported to the Eight Sentinels instantly.

[SnowVix]

But this game is supposed to respect our time, isn't it? So how come we need to play at prime time, just to get higher chance to find a group? 4PM should definitely not be some dead zone, I'm not from NA, but I bet you can find groups for other content just fine even at that time.

I didn't realize that natural population trends during the day caused by employment were something that a video game company could do anything about.

[Oizen]

I love deep dungeons but once you get all the rewards from one and solo it theres really no reason to go back.

Orthos also has an unfortunate distinction of being the only deep dungeon thats shit for leveling jobs due to how slow the first floors are compared to POTD or HoH

[Rolder50]

I didn't realize that natural population trends during the day caused by employment were something that a video game company could do anything about.

Strange, in almost any other MMO or game in general that I play, there aren't dead zones like that regardless of what time it is.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Strange, in almost any other MMO or game in general that I play, there aren't dead zones like that regardless of what time it is.

Really? Because in some of the MMO's I've played I've been directly responsible for dead zones... Oh... wait... we're talking about a different type of dead zone... >.>

[Striker44]

But this game is supposed to respect our time, isn't it? So how come we need to play at prime time, just to get higher chance to find a group? 4PM should definitely not be some dead zone, I'm not from NA, but I bet you can find groups for other content just fine even at that time.

A game "respecting your time" means there isn't a perceived need to constantly be logging in for significant stretches day after day in order to remain "competitive" with your fellow players. FFXIV is one of the best games out there at respecting players' time in that regard with the weekly caps on most things allowing you to log in whenever suits you, and even if you take substantial breaks from the game, gil is relatively easy to come by and every couple patches new sellable crafted gear is introduced that lets any max level player jump right in with current content.

4:00PM Eastern Time is definitely not prime time in any way, shape, or form. Remember that the primary demographic for MMO's today is no longer teenagers, college kids, and recent grads. It's now mainly people in their 30's and 40's with families and full-time careers. As someone else mentioned, at 4PM Eastern time even the east coast folks are still most likely at work, let alone the rest of the main NA timezones. "Primetime" for NA is more like 8-11pm if you're going off Eastern time. It is a testament, though, to the size of the playerbase that so much other, non-niche content does run perfectly fine even at off hours.

Strange, in almost any other MMO or game in general that I play, there aren't dead zones like that regardless of what time it is.

At least for me, most other online games I play don't really have niche content. There's only a small number of queue-based options, period, so with everyone funneled into only a few places, it naturally keeps things going. FFXIV is unique in the amount of niche-style queues that exist. (And heck, head over to the Destiny 2 forums as one example and see how even a game with that smaller number of queues still ends up with "dead zones".)