TalisStormbringer wrote:My worry is this game is turning into and in some views already is a dead game and they need to do something with the dropping population. I ran this whole wave and last wave. This wave I was on every day and I never saw the population of a 10000 person MMO ever go above 300 players.
I never built anything in this wave because of the incoming wipe and I never really tried to skill up due to the difficulty and the pending loss of everything that the wipe will cause.
This is a major issue in my opinion so i am trying to get a poll going because it is effecting this game, and i hope to avoid this great game from vanishing.
So in my opinion what will the test run 4 do for us except see even less people (especially as the above pic shows that it will be the last test run before the beta wave 2), where if we move to wipe the server and characters we can improve the population while still running a beta (which still means there are bugs to be fixed and improvmetns to be made) and the things our character's now do (skilling up & building) are now permanent.
You think like a bored player and not about the game. Let me explain as simply as possible: The population doesn't matter much at this point, they still have more data then they can chew. If they ask for stress test on something the bigger guilds will arrange that - on the last failed JH the 2 biggest alliances had about 210 players, the 2 smaller ones had about 100 more. From the online of 650 or so players during the JH almost half of them were the bigger guilds - they don't really play now, so the population dropped significantly. The reason they don't play - the game in it's current state is unplayable! How will going for wave 2 going to fix that?
PvP is central in LiF - it can't happen now due to stability problems and lack of optimization. On top of that there is no endgame to keep you in the game (the 2nd reason most players are inactive atm) - there are no economy and no wars, there is only base building to do which most don't have motivation for because of A: there will be wipe and B: there is no rush for improvement if there is no danger and competition (impossible to wage real wars now).
So please tell me how will going to OBT now fix the population issue? Yes short term there will be spike, but after that it will die again and this time permanently. They need the CBT to test, polish and fine tune the war mechanics, the economy and to stabilize the servers so that real PvP is actually possible. OBT without all that is death sentence. And they didn't even implement the prototypes of that yet, that will happen next testrun and who here with any past experience will believe that a miracle will happen and everything will work? So yes there will be 2 or even 3 more testruns before the game is ready to go OBT without that being a death sentence.
Also what you ignore is the lack of wipe after OBT. That means when the OBT starts it's soft release. You can't have major exploits after the no wipe point if you expect the game to live. And such exploits still exist. The traders posts were not introduced this testrun, because the exploit allowing you to have some unlimited resources in top quality is still in the game. Tell me - how is stuff like that going to affect the economy in a no-wipe state? And that's just the top of the iceberg...
As for the grind - this is not a fresh world anymore where the grind is real and painful. The big guilds have x5.5 multiplier food for a long time, just trade with them for it. New recruits that are joining in each new test run level their skills to 90 in 2-3 days, because the grind is much faster with such food + there are materials to level up with.