Debating returning to the game.Follow

Activity levels have dropped a bit over the last few months, but I was heartened to see that Bismarck broke a thousand players again on Saturday night during NA prime time, up from 600 a few weeks ago.

At this point it depends on what your goals would be. Do you want to get a job to 99 and do some of the older content, e.g. finish older expansions? Or do you want to jump into an endgame situation in the latest expansion? The latter I think would be much more difficult to do for a returning player (it's tough for those of us who never quit!), but if you are just hoping to play again and get a job to 99 and do some story related things, I'd recommend returning. Leveling is fairly easy now and much of the older content can be mowed down either solo or with a small group.

Valefor has a pretty average population. There are still Abyssea leveling party shouts, so you should be able to cap any jobs you need quickly. Getting into SoA stuff can be a little overwhelming but it's not bad if you take it a step at a time. If you need a hand getting started again, look me up in-game as Primal.

I'll hijack briefly... How important are the last 7 levels I would need for all of my sub jobs? If that important, where should I go to cap them?

You won't be accepted to any group content without appropriate sub job levels. You should cap them on GoV in the Crawlers Nest.

You'd be surprised how fast those levels will fly by in crawler's nest. If it's only 7 levels per sub, you might be able to knock out each one in a single good 1 hour session or two mediocre sessions - don't warp back to town when you're done, just log out in CN and pick right back up where you left off.

Game desperately needs a server merge. Hell, it needed another one a long time ago. I played XIV for a few days and it was just nice to see people in places again lol.

I understand seeing larger numbers on a /sea all makes it seem like the game is in better shape than seeing lower numbers, but it's a temporary fix. You'll lose players faster than you were when more lose their names and just decide to walk away.

The overall problem of "what there is to do that's fun or entertaining and that won't be invalidated with the next update?" still remains and will still eat away at the playerbase until you're back to 600 or so online again.