Is the Game "dead"?

General Discussion General Discussion
109

Depends on what region you’re in.
As of the time of this post, the most populated servers for each regions are as follows;

US East; 612
US West; 400
SA East; 205
AP SE; 1,422 (This number is artificially high because there are only 2 servers left, so this number can be read as to mean almost the entire region.)
EU Central; 876

So, if you’re in SA East or US west, yes, it is.
If you’re in US East, or EU, you’ve got a couple months before you can’t do anything due to no population, and the game mechanics start breaking down. No more t5 workstations because nobody can upkeep them, no more wars, and no more OPRs. And by proxy of there being no t5 work stations, no more expeditions either.

All good and well to discuss peak player counts across the entire game, but those 23k are split amongst 34 servers. The majority of these 23k are on the top 1 or 2 servers for their region, meaning theres about 25 absolutely dead servers where the game has just broken down and cannot be played because there isn’t enough population to do so.

This is something of a self fulfilling prophecy to boot. Returning players will come back to empty towns with no workstations, nobody to run opr with, nobody to go to war with, nobody to run expeditions with. Whatever motivations they had to return will very quickly fade because the odds are, unless they got really lucky with their home server choice, they are on one of the 25 dead servers.

New players who might be venturing in will miss out on the “new player experience”, which is funny because the game hasn’t even been out a year, everyone is still a new player barring alpha testers. But even still, they will be facing the same thing the returning players are. The difference being is they won’t have a solid grasp on why nothing works, because they weren’t around for when it did work. The first few months of launch.

If you thought NW lacked end game content before, wew lad, just imagine what a new player experience is like with no crafting content, no expedition content, no opr content, and no war content. Needless to say, they won’t stick around either.

So, returning players won’t stay around long, and new players won’t stay around long either. Kind of means there’s only one way this can possibly go - Down.

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110

So, if you’re in SA East or US west, yes, it is.

lol SA East is not dead. At least not the Devaloka server. It’s 8, 9 am on a weekday, so it’s normal the low pop (people need to work or go to school). Around noon it hits around 500 online and at the end of the afternoon it reaches the peak of 1400 players and stays like that for about 3 or 4 hours until it starts to drop again. I would say that SA East has a more casual population. But it’s still alive.

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111

At least not the Devaloka server.

So, in other words, exactly what I said in the next line.

At absolute peak time, Devaloka is at 1,301 players. The highest population server cannot even reach 70% capacity, on a 2,000 slot limit. During non peak hours, it dips to 8 players. You don’t consider this dead? What about those who got unlucky with their initial server choice and their server died? Irkalla for instance has 243 players at peak time. Is that one dead?

If you merged all 3 existing servers for SA East, you are still under capacity for a single server. Is this not dead?

Best hope your available play time is during those peak hours - Off peak hours, you don’t even have enough players there to start a war on the most populated server in SA East.

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112

At absolute peak time, Devaloka is at 1,301 players.

sa east
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Yesterday at 11pm there were still 1358 players online (68%). The server reaches around 1300 to 1400 players every day at peak times. As you can see, the curve is quite clear. It starts to rise around 6pm and falls at 11pm.

Even though this amount is around 65-70% of the server’s total capacity, it’s far from dead. Moreover, it is a regional server, which causes this almost empty at times between 4 am (192 players) and 7 am (108 players), since people go to sleep. If you compare it to crowded European servers like Dry Tree, you will see that the fluctuations are not that distinct.

Could be better? Sure, but reach 70% daily is not bad.

113

What a great way to repeat exactly what I had just said with a 0.5% adjustment to the numbers.

Again, what about those stranded on the other two. Great. Those on the most populated server get to play at 65% capacity.

But the region isn’t Devaloka. It’s SA East. What about the other players on the region not in that server.

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114

I think the game is not dead yet, I am currently playing on Devaloka which is the most populated server in SA. In my opinion NW still doesn’t offer an incentive to log in every day, the end game is very repetitive and after 8 months of play it feels a bit demotivating. Logically I speak of my feelings that should not necessarily be the same as for the rest of the players, but honestly it seems to me that constantly falling back on certain errors (bugs) make players lose a little patience. I hope the next update changes the course of the game for the better.

115

T minus 2 weeks. I think people will like the idea of arena but hate the stamina and lack of healing coming their way and start to wash up numbers.

116

It will be kept afloat until that Desert Zone patch drops. They’ll have a huge Twitch campaign, streamers involved, the whole deal again. If the game doesn’t recover after that…

117

Don’t come back the game is the same and end game is still rng based and boring, can’t gather or craft shit because everything is expensive, and there is a lack of t5 materials, you want to have good gear? Yeah people will say you have to buy it. Lmao good luck getting good stuff over 500k because everything in this game is over price…

118

I thought the game already died back in November.

Or December was it?

Na it was in Feburary…yeah February was when it was supposed to die.

No wait after the March patch…

Im being ridiculous, everyone knows its going to die after the Arena patch…

…

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119

Peak is merely a single moment in time out of 24 hours when the most people are on. For most servers it looks to be at around 6-7pm local time . The majority of people who play games don’t play them like jobs, yet servers have population all hours of the day. Even someone who plays regularly every day for 2-3 hours may not be playing at peak time. I almost never do. I’d bet it’s a pretty safe estimation that 10x peak is your “regular” player base. Those are the people who play every day for at least a few hours.

Double that again for players who are casuals who still play but maybe only one a week or on a weekend.

120

400k lul
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This is what comes up if you use mmo population which im guessing you did for your numbers. The header shows a daily active players of 400k+ and the chart shows around 170k. 170k I can believe but 400k+ was back in the fall of 2021 imo, MAYBE during the early winter months as well but no way this year NW has seen these numbers.

Also theres no way NW pulled 1 million players on April 26th lets be honest.

121

LA CCP
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LA DP
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10x concurrent players? So if we do your math on Lost Ark is 500k peak, so 10x that is 5 million players, then we double that again for casuals and we are at a healthy 10 million daily players for Lost Ark. See how crazy it sounds?

122

XIV needed an ENTIRE ENGINE REWORK to make its comeback, NW does not need that, the engine works pretty great, it’s just a lot of bugs that need to be ironed out and patched up. I think it’s a lot easier to get to a usable system in its current state than what they had to do with XIV.

As for the game overall, I think it’s going to get to a point where some people will be losing interest and some hardcores will be taking some time off, this could be good or bad for the game, but I think with merges as they are most servers have enough people to keep sustaining for people who are enjoying the game or trying to catch back up after having time off. I see people saying they’ve been away for months and just coming back a couple times a day, so there are some people trickling back in to check it out. Hopefully this normalizes population for a bit as it’ll be a few months before the devs can really get things out to have “enough content” for everyone. But it’s also clear this is being worked on. We got a roadmap, there are also more parts of the hidden regions slowly showing up on maps, and we’re getting new dungeons coming. Things are progressing for sure.

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124

Im not here saying LA is good or bad, me personally I spent 87 hours in LA and dropped it, wasnt my thing. I have spent over 1k hours in NW though. Both NW and LA have a large bot problem, lets stay on topic :slight_smile:

125

I had this hater on Reddit tell me a few months ago that the game was going to be dead and I’d no longer be playing in may. He was so arrogant that he set a Reddit bot timer to send me a response. It came through the other day. Still playing everyday. They just never learn.

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126

No, there is not lol. That number is entirely made up. We had ~ 800k peak players, with your logic it means this game sold 8 million copies? And then you think Amazon would not have bragged about a game selling that much? Come on.

This game has a exactly that, maybe 20-30k active players, at the utmost best.

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127

There’s nothing to recover. Brimstone Sands will be the last piece of content they have for this game and then it’s maintenance mode for 6-12 months and then this game will be shut down.

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128

It’s a game designed for bots, not humans.