Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
I'm in the open world a lot. Hunts, FATEs, gathering, tribal quests, treasure maps. So are other players. Unless it's middle of the night for the region, it's rare that I don't run into several other players. There may not be enough to make the zone feel "lively", as others have put it, because they're spread out but players are definitely present.

What I don't want is for those activities to be disrupted because someone is in the mood to beat up other players. That's part of why instanced PvP was developed - so players with no interest in world PvP can do the other content in the zone without it being disrupted.

One other thing that I don't think anyone else has mentioned yet is rewards. The vast majority of players are very reward focused, and they don't include "having fun" under rewards. If there's nothing they consider a worthwhile reward for participating, they won't do it.

Which is a shame - I did have fun with friends in the old Southshore-Tarren Mill battles in WoW back in Burning Crusade and Wrath before Blizzard decided to destroy Southshore in Cataclysm and there was no reason left to defend it.
The counter-argument is that activities such as world bosses that bring out more people - specifically PvPers - add to the number of people in the OW and make those boss fights more enjoyable in the process.

I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who was in a a legion (FC) who had a number of bosses on farm in another game, and knowing that we not only had to contend with other (PVE) legions, but PvPers from the other faction, made it much spicier, especially for anyone with high rank (i.e. potentially more to lose, or special skills to use).

By the way, I'm not proposing some massive change to enforce OW PvP in FFXIV, that's never part of the initial game design and I would really understand why many people would find that ridiculous. I do however find that's it's not unreasonable to discuss how we could introduce specific zones - I recall SWTOR had one. It could even be used for player or Square events, and no one that isn't interested in PvP would be affected.