Please, I am not trolling. I am just explaining what I have been seeing the past three to four months. I set all time so that most people are off work for PST and EST.
My server is valefor. Even after merging more then a year ago, they server population is now as it was before the merge.
Average player base on a saturday afterrnon (7pm EST~10pm EST): around 1500
Average player base on sunday afternoon (7pm EST~10pm EST): around 1400
Weekdays: goes from 800~1.1K and seems the lowest day people are on are thursdays.
Most seem afk at Ru'lude or Port Jeuno.
There have been no neo-nyzul shouts, meeble burrows, voidwatch, quests, missions shouts for a long time (or very little). Ever since the update a month or so ago that introduced meeble burrows there have been no shouts that enter my vision of "prime time" USA time. I even went to ffxiah.com and checked the shout page periodically to make sure. This means meeble burrows is basically a bust unless people make a dedicated linkshell for it.
When there is a voidwatch shout it has a rough >50% chance to be either Qilin, Uptala, or Aello.
RMT fell cleave groups spam the shouts nearly every day. Blinkers were nerfed to the ground but this does not stop them, they max all lights and sell beads to npcs which need to be nerfed also. This cruor nerf also dropped the cell price to <50K/stack and still falling.
Dynamis is beyond crowded now from the blinker nerf and it's absolutely chaos in there. Avoid if you don't want to make enemies.
If you want to do the WOTG missions before the new avatars come out, good luck. No one is interested in helping.
Linkshells are now ripping people off from neo-nyzul before the major nerfs are coming (And if you did not know some are getting banned for that lamp glitch/speed hacks but I wont get into that). Leaders seem to get full sets and the ls suddenly dissolves and the underdogs are left with nothing. When they try to expose them so others don't fall victim they get battered, ridiculed, and ignored, so no one cares about them. People say it was their own damn fault and they should suck it up or quit, which is wrong. Leaders go on to make new linkshells and repeat for other sets (this is happening RIGHT NOW on Valefor and NO ONE is stopping them).
With all these issues getting worse and worse I don't think FFXI will last that much longer because everyone knows meebles burrows is getting updated with a few more job abilities and HUGE nerfs next update which will add literally no content to the game (You can not deny this).
If you read this your best bet is to just wait it out until a month before (or when) the expansion hits to start playing again. As of this month and probably months ahead FFXI is only going to get worse and lower population servers like mine are feeling the full blunt force of it.
Edited, Nov 18th 2012 7:36pm by Randomffxiguy19