I won’t go into the million other things that folks in this forum, Reddit, Youtube, social media, etc, have gone through on why this game is bleeding numbers. Many valid.
My only ask at this point while my server US-West Yggadrasil went from 1000+ players online on a Friday night to absolute ghost town is:
Communicate with us.
I know it’s hard because every single thing you guys post gets ripped apart, criticized, demeaned, etc. Granted, it’s sort of your fault for fumbling the ball so hard with a game with originally this much potential (1M concurrent players!), with major disappointment after major disappointment.
But I know there is still lots to save.
The most recent PTR 1 patch seems extremely promising and I know many of my friends are looking forward to that to drop especially the OPR updates and combat fluidity improvements.
But we need more than that.
We need confidence in the game studio.
We need more communication from you. We want to see a roadmap on what we can expect.
We know you guys have a carrot. Now dangle that goddamn carrot in front of us so the remaining playerbase (or those that still are clinging on) have something to believe in.
I know you guys have lots of goodies coming up. There supposedly should have been PTR 2 announced yesterday or today (but nothing…). There supposedly is supposed to be a new Brimstone Sands zone. There supposedly is supposed to be PVP arenas released. There supposedly is Blunderbuss/daggers coming out…
These are all theoretical with the community no way of knowing when this will come out.
I put the blame the head honchos for that. I feel that the moderators and communication team are muzzled on what they can provide. No real details until the last minute.
The worst part is the MAJOR drop in concurrent users. I believe it’s because MANY players have dropped their playtime to a very small % of what they used to play. Removing more than 10,000 bots also shows in the drop of concurrent users.
A majority of worlds have less than 400 concurrent users now. 30,000 concurrent users now, is the maximum. I’m willing to bet that a majority of players want to know what is going happen next week on their dead world. Not in the next quarter.
The previous merger plan should go back to the drawing board, since we need to merge a lot more servers now to have a constant 700+ prime-time concurrent users on a world.
Nothing about that.
When will be the next weekly patch? We never know 24h+ in advance.
Can we prepare for said patch? No. It takes time to digest 200 pages of fixes, to plan what to test in-game when it’s released, especially for bugs that affected us.
And their replies are often generic, without substance.
I understand it’s a new game, that it almost feels like a year too early, but according to Steam, 2M people bought this game, 40$ each, that’s close to 100M$ in revenues. It should give them more freedom to hire more people.
We cross our fingers for more detailed, less generic, more frequent communications.
As someone that is in the software development world, observing the development cycles and health of each release is extremely concerning.
I’m not exaggerating in saying almost every patch has major issues with it. It used to be that the only area where there were no bugs was the cash shop, and even that had a game breaking issue yesterday. What?!
The past few days, I even noticed a bug where you cannot respawn - you’ll be stuck in the loading screen forever until you restart the game. This killed open world PVP in our server when we had a 150+ people wpvp just two nights ago, because none of our guildies could respawn.
War/invasion rosters are broken because there’s this bug where it says you aren’t signed up for war, but you actually are, prompting people to sign up multiple times. And then when war starts, you couldn’t join the roster because of this issue…
Mutations and orbs completely decimated the population because no one likes being timegated and limited for content. People are saving their orbs because Dynasty is broken / too hard.
It’s to the point where when a new update is released, I’m more concerned about the hidden changes and what broke, than what is listed on the patch notes…