Empty cities can be solved with world hopping

[Airum]

Tiny rant. I'm sure it's been spoken about before but this just feels like a missed opportunity.

Title says it, but it has always plagued my mind with how empty most previous city-states feel after the new expansion drops. I understand it's "old content" but each area is beautiful and has so much potential to stay filled with people or even just to populate them a bit.

That can be done with being able to world hop from each main aetheryte. Places like the Crystarium, Ishgard, Old Sharlayan, and more could be filled with people that just want to set their home aetheryte to somewhere other than Limsa, Ul'Dah, or Gridania if they so choose. I am sure it's not easy to implement since I'm no dev, but this is something that would be a big QoL update in my mind.

[Hyperia]

I would rather that they merge all worlds in each major DC local so we would have JP and EU+NA +OCE worlds, just 2. Everything else would be handled by instanced zones to prevent overload.

This would ensure that all zones have people in them and the system would add new instances as needed. Of course, hints would have to be tweaked on how they work but otherwise, it would solve a lot of problems.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I would rather that they merge all worlds in each major DC local so we would have JP and EU+NA +OCE worlds, just 2. Everything else would be handled by instanced zones to prevent overload.

This would ensure that all zones have people in them and the system would add new instances as needed. Of course, hints would have to be tweaked on how they work but otherwise, it would solve a lot of problems.

The reason with have more DCs is for contiguous logins, it’s why dawntrail was a much smoother launch experience than previous expansions in terms of logon wait times despite also having the lightest amount of players in ages.

[KillaKilala]

World hopping won't solve this problem. This problem exists because there is not much to do in the old areas and the open world as a whole, and more importantly it's too easy to traverse in this game. In the old mmos any town could serve as a base of operation for players because it was taking too much time to travel from one city to another and the roads were dangerous, but in this game you can just spend 1000 gil and teleport anywhere... Now there is another way to solve your problem. Devs just need to make a system that projects players from other servers to your server, like in the Dark Souls games.