Eureka Orthos is a Dead Queue in NA

[MsMisato]

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.

Yea you gotta get it all done in a few weeks of release if not the majority moves on back to going afk in limsa lol.

[VelKallor]

If you add new rewards to old content, people will go back to that old content to earn the rewards. (It should be noted that this would require a new currency type to prevent people from simply using what they have stockpiled) It doesn't necessarily have to be made soloable.

Ive done some of Eureka, and as I am managing okay so far, the further I get the harder it is not to get clobbered repeatedly. Eureka and Bozja were created as group content, not solo. Regardless of what rewards, the issue will be in seeing that there are enough people available to make it doable.

I agree that rewards will help, but thats half the problem.

[Zeastria]

a) There is little to no reason to do it more than 4 clears (for mount)..
b) The rewards dosnt make up for the 6hr it takes.
c) The fights (bosses) are also harder which inc the possibility of wipes..
= going with random is huge risk and most will just stick with premade to ensure safe clears.

[Lyth]

EO has less of a role in job levelling than PotD would have traditionally had prior to the advent of job level skips because it covers a smaller levelling range. If you're looking to experience the story, I would recommend simply putting up a PF for it rather than randomly queuing into DF. EO is also probably more solo friendly than its predecessors, especially in the story levels, so that's always an option.

With regards to doing a Floor 100 run, while you can set up a group through PF, you're probably better off joining one of the Deep Dungeon communities to find like-minded players. I see full runs for all three being organized all the time, with a mix of new and veteran players alike. And the runs themselves can be fairly profitable, even after you've gotten a complete set of accessories.

You're not going to convince everyone to enjoy this type of content, regardless of how it is incentivized. There is a definite audience for it, though, especially amongst players looking for solo challenges as well as speedrun opportunities. If you're not one of those players, that's perfectly fine, perhaps you might find something else that suits your fancy. That's how a theme park works.

[TaleraRistain]

4pm Eastern is early for Aether and that's even earlier in Pacific time. That's probably part of why it's not populated. People are still working.

[Toutatis]

I just wish they’d make the adds on the lower levels a bit less spongy. Sure, they don’t do a lot of damage but neither do you and soloing those levels is just long and boring, especially if you have low aetherpool. I got my aetherpool up on my main but now that I want to do it on an alt, matchmaking has died and it’s just tedious. I am rarely in a situation where I can set enough time aside to run a PF.

In PotD and HoH, I can easily go in solo on a character with 0 aetherpool and no regen potions and farm aetherpool by myself by running 0-50/ 0-30 a few times before moving up to more interesting levels. In EO, farming aetherpool solo takes forever and if I am playing from a location where my connection is not great, the risk of DCing is just discouraging given how long it takes to run a set of 10 low levels.

In fact, even with high aetherpool, levels 0-40 in EO take too long to solo for what they have to offer and it’s just not fun. It feels like both the adds and myself are trying to hit each other with a wet noodle for way too long before being able to reach the interesting stuff.

[Deo14]

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.

So does the same happen for other content in NA? Does it take over half a hour to find a group for expert roulette at 4PM?

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.



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".)

That sounds like definiton tailored to suit the argument (kind of like the stuff in my signature). "Respecting your time" is more general, you're talking more specifically about FOMO and catching up. But funnily enough, EO doesn't "respect your time" even in your definition - it does not allow you to log in whenever it suits you, if you weren't there in the first week it released, you simply missed out on it and now you suffer insane queues times, even finding group through PF will take so much more time compared to when EO was recent.

And once again, it doesn't mean that game should be unplayable outside the prime time, there are people doing stuff outside of that, just not EO/V&C. It's just that some content is so terribly designed that it makes no sense to do it more than few times. It's not even relevant to the fact that EO is niche, V&C is just fancier dungeon, there's nothing niche about it, yet it's still dead.

[AwesomeJr44]

While we're on the topic of Aetherpool farming in Deep Dungeon, I'll ask a question that I've been wanting to hear some general consensus about for a while.

Would anyone care if the Aetherpool grind was cut down significantly? It really seems like people don't really like farming it and most of the enjoyable part of Deep Dungeons seems to be done once you're already at max aetherpool anyways. Why not have the cap be at 50 or something, double the power of each aetherpool point (or whatever it would take to compensate for it) so that people can do the content without as much of a time sink beforehand? Don't get me wrong, I can and typically do enjoy grinds, but the Aetherpool grind has always seemed rather pointless to me outside of crafting grips for weapons, which could still be done if it was shorter.

[Rosenstrauch]

Would anyone care if the Aetherpool grind was cut down significantly?

I'd be all for it. At the very least it'd mean transitioning from matched play to solo would be a little less painful.

[Toutatis]

While we're on the topic of Aetherpool farming in Deep Dungeon, I'll ask a question that I've been wanting to hear some general consensus about for a while.

Would anyone care if the Aetherpool grind was cut down significantly? It really seems like people don't really like farming it and most of the enjoyable part of Deep Dungeons seems to be done once you're already at max aetherpool anyways. Why not have the cap be at 50 or something, double the power of each aetherpool point (or whatever it would take to compensate for it) so that people can do the content without as much of a time sink beforehand? Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy grinds, but the Aetherpool grind has always seemed rather pointless to me outside of crafting grips for weapons, which could still be done if it was shorter.

I don’t mind it in HoH and PotD as it is rather fast to level up even on solo. In EO the current problem with aetherpool is not that much the quantity but that the group queue is dead and soloing a set of 10 floors at low levels takes way too long due to the spongy adds. As I mentioned a few posts earlier, even with high aetherpool, level 1-40 adds have too much HP, don’t do much dmg (unless you stand in stupid) and it’s just boring to solo. I’d rather simply reduce the HP of the EO adds on levels 1-40.