No exploratory content

[DixieBellOCE]

The problem with exploratory zones is there is no system in place to keep them alive after the initial FOMO rush when everyone gets what they want and stops doing them. It's a bit ironic that Variant gets the same complaints but they have more future-proofing since they will be something that we will be able to go do at our leisure far into the future. Criterion is a little more limited but still has the factor that you can kind of choose when you want to interact with it.

The more involved aspects of exploratory content aren't designed like that. They rely either on large numbers of people to be able to get through without things like essences or lots of pre-planning and organization. They're not something you can just choose to jump into and be assured you will be able to progress. So they're popular at first when those large numbers of people are available but get more difficult to tackle when those numbers fall off. When I finally finished Eureka recently, most instances in NA prime time were lucky to field 30 to 40 people and most only when a popular NM was up. And the Echo can help but it isn't tuned high enough to make up for the loss with everything. And these are instances that have a maximum of what, 100 something?

Bozja is even worse. I've been languishing at mettle level 23 because I'm often the only person out there doing FATEs unless they lead to something. Most have gotten what they wanted from this content so there isn't a reason to go back to it and the game design makes it difficult to tackle it on your own.

Until they can fix that aspect of exploratory zones, why would they utilize development time for something designed with such a short shelf life?

I mean.. Eureka right now, still has players doing it.. Even on a dead datacenter like Materia you can always find people in the zones working on their relics.

Same with Bozja, but to a lesser extent, there is always people doing something in there, mostly just cluster grinding since its easy gil. The worst part about Bozja is you cannot complete your relics without other people, where as eureka you can.

The same cannot be said for Variant dungeons, i've queued for them for a couple of days and haven't got a single pop, yes i could run them solo but that defeats the purpose of an MMO. For now i'm just doing it with FC members when we can all be online at the same time.
So why is it that 7 year old content still gets enough people to do the content with, but current content doesn't?