Is FFXI still alive and well?

[Rostum]

World of Warcraft was released in Australia and North America in 2004, and 2005 for Europe.

[fairweather]

Wow.
Time flies.

Maybe I was thinking of something else.
But huh. I thought it had been around for aaages.

[Roogle]

The game seems to be emptier than I remembered. We started in Windy, and I've only seen 5 other players so far.

Likely, the game will never recapture its vibrant low level population from the early days simply because of where the game is in its development.

[Beyond]

The starter nations were always craft-based metropolises. Nowadays, who crafts? Campaign gives you something much more constructive to do while LFG (Which is not long at all now, with Level Sync).

[Bahamut2000X]

Al Zahbi effectively replaced needing to craft in other towns since they have every guild in one zone.

Though you still gotta go back to the main ones to rank up and get guild points.

[Roogle]

Al Zahbi is not necessarily a dependable place to craft as many crafters are not ready for battle. Beseiged can happen up for hours at a time under certain conditions.

[Del Murder]

Besieged is maximum of one hour unless you have stuff coming back to back, which is rare.

Those guild NPCs get kidnapped a lot though.