I lurk this thread on occasion and I'm a bit curious now, as an outsider looking in. With all this RP stuff, I'm surprised the game's modding scene has gotten this ridiculous.
Was cross-world and cross-data center travel an event that completely atomized this game's community? I used to hear back in the 2010's that any given server would have a some kind of sense of who you are if you're from there, but I don't hear much about a sense of community or familiarity outside of linkshells or guilds anymore.
Yes, 100%.
And for the longest time it was made worse by this games dogshit block system. You were physically unable to block people from other servers for the longest time, despite them being able to visit. There's some horror stories about stalkers and people harrassing them in this game and it's well deserved, even if it's caused by petty drama and infighting, when the game had a block function that didn't even work on a core level, it was a recipe for disaster.
Linkshells are dead, discord killed them.
FC's (the Guilds) are dead, lack of meaningful group content killed them and cross server made putting down roots in a community pointless.
"Dead" In the sense they still exist, but they serve literally zero practical use so outside some friends making a guild together to vibe together with a tag or a roleplay event wanting to share a house, there's nothing. Airships are not really group content anymore and are used by some people (hello) in one man FC's to passively farm millions of gil a week. it benefits one person only.
Edit: Oh and also dont forget crafting. Since you could just hop to another server to use their market, crafting communities died overnight and are to this day, bot dominated. Doing it is pointless. You can earn some gil, but you will never make as much as the bot factories. I hear people tell others to craft for money all the time, but it's old outdated information. It's more of a pyramid scheme. You will earn pennies, they will make hundreds of millions.
