Silence of the Lands

I didn’t log in today but I spoke to Teila about the game (as usual)! She had been seeking since 5.30pm and hadn’t had an invite when I came home at 11pm. She went downstairs to play FFXII and, lo and behold, she found a party invite a long way up her screen an hour later. Sod’s Law is not a myth, folks. BBK and Aka both logged at 9.45pm tonight apparently as they couldn’t get parties as NIN and BLM respectively. You know something is wrong when you can’t get a party as a NIN. Teila had done /sea alls at various times of the day and there were like two people online between L45 and L49 or something.

“How many people are online at the moment?” I asked her.

“Around one thousand, eight-hundred,” Teila replied. That’s the usual figure for our playing time; although it seems to be double that during a Japanese evening.

“Now do a ‘sea all’ one to seventy-five,” I asked, “as that will show you everyone who is not anon.”

Turned out about a third of the total number of players online were /anon, most likely a few campers, but mostly mules and RMT no doubt.

“Now do a ‘sea all’ seventy-five,” I asked again. The result was around four-hundred.

Doing the math, that meant there were around two-hundred players online who were not /anon and not L75, which is a miniscule amount of people for a MMORPG. That’s about three Dynamis’ worth of players, and when you look at it like that, that’s nothing. When you consider of those two-hundred people who were actually seeking, it’s very limiting.

So where is everyone? Looking on other forums, it’s also the Americans who are having a problem getting invites too apparently, but us Europeans can’t even put together parties ourselves with such limiting figures.

Is FFXI dying out at last? I doubt it, but is there now too much endgame content that people level one job and then stay at L75 doing nothing else?

Comments on a postcard please!