Carbuncle.Anesthesia said:
»I won't deny the game is in a pretty bad state, but there have been merc request threads just about as long as there's been FFXIAH.
Once upon a time ppl paid me to make prov watcher pt, farm testi, do salvage 1, brew in abyssea.
So yeah, irrelevant to how unplayable it is.
Those are different factors that have nothing to do with population.
Game is unplayable when you have to 5th+ box something to get things done/people screaming for a merge, and taking hours of shouting to form a single alliance.
Unplayable when most people needs to switch servers in order to succeed @ end game, also the horrible/sad trend of paying to a dedicated group for a tojil win because there's nobody to form a decent group or linkshell for that, and the list goes on.
Everyone knows this, especially when there are 200 players online per server and half of those numbers are afk/mules.