A Lived in World?

[Jeeqbit]

With FFXIV, I've noticed that after the initial burst of excitement with new zones it emulates an entirely empty feel. Like your WoL is by their lonesome with only the occasional glimpse of a fellow adventurer.

It's mostly because the game has you go through the MSQ and then doesn't send you back to them very much.

There used to be a lot of FATE farming to level alt jobs, but this died when Palace of the Dead released in Heavensward. There used to be FATE farm parties for Anima weapons as well, especially because of the FATEs were awful to do alone (such as in Coerthas Western Highlands).

Now, you can just level your other jobs with POTD and destroy old FATEs with Blue Mage or from over leveling.

It's not actually true that there is no activity in the zones though. People do the MSQ occasionally, they do hunt trains, they fight and spawn S ranks, they do relic grinds, they do bicolor gemstone farms in ShB and EW areas (and especially in the last EW area), they fight large-scale bosses such as Chi, Daivadipa, Archaeotania or Formidable, they do gathering, they do beast tribes and they do custom deliveries.

The reason you don't see quite as many people in these areas is because SE puts the majority of content into instances (duties) that you queue for. So all the people that would be flooding these areas in Guild Wars are in duties in this game.

You mentioned Eureka and Bozja and that is a perfect example of this. These are both duties that you queue into!

Housing even reflects this, with it being somewhat rare to cross paths with another player in the district unless you're attending a venue.

Unless it's an FC house. If you teleport to your FC house, usually there are lots of people hanging out there, unless your FC is dead.

is it entirely bad or is there some good to be found in the lack of traffic present in a single instance?

There is such a thing as too many (causing lag) and such a thing as too little (causing it to be empty). I suspect they queue everyone into duties for things because it allows them to know exactly how many people are there and to scale the content appropriately.