Materia/Oceanican Data Center needs help please!

[DixieBellOCE]

I wanna focus on this because while Materia does have populations problems, this is more widespread than just our little corner on the map. I've been playing on JP a lot these past two raid tiers, the PF changed dramatically (most JP pugs go to Mana to raid now) and the overall feeling is one of exhaustion. People are retiring from XIV, and while it's not fair to measure this during a long, long intended lull between now and 7.0 it is kind of alarming.
OCE is the canary in the coal mine so to speak. When the population shifts away from XIV we see it most starkly... and ultimately I don't think cross region will fix the issue. NA/EU/JP players aren't gonna want to come here to play with us, to help fill our queues (NA can't really be bothered helping Dynamis let alone Materia), and if we collectively go elsewhere to make our own queues pop what does that mean for Materia? The sprouts who don't know any better stay in hours long queues because we've vanished, our overworlds become even more barren, the rp scene dries up overnight...
While I do want SE to help us out a bit, I don't think there's much they can actually do. Maybe after PAX Aus we'll see another jump in sprout numbers.

Overall the exhaustion is caused by the game systems themselves.

Nothing changed from SHB to EW, we are stilling running on the same treadmill of content that was predicted and nothing surprised us. If anything people are just bored, there is no long term content to keep people invested in playing the game, you log in for ~2 weeks every 4 months and you are up to date and have no reason to play again.

If the content structure doesn't change for 7.0 it will just be more of the same, and that will just be the final straw for most players. A lot of the WoW exodus players have left, after they reached the end game and realized FF has nothing to offer them outside of small content drops.

Square really misread the situation when the playerbase boom happened, and should have started creating content to keep people invested in the game. Instead we now just have a deserted wasteland of potential that will never be expanded on.

DC travel will never solve the problem, it will just leave Materia as barren as Dynamis is, as somebody who experienced Dynamis at launch and stayed there for 7 months, i can tell you that it is not in good shape.

The only solution to Materia is to implement cross-DC DF for casual content, so that people can still play the game, but don't have to travel elsewhere to do so. (Or just.. make better content that keeps people invested in the game)