As much as 1.0 had problems, they were a different type of problem (mostly - iirc they tried to do some fully server-side inventory stuff that had predictable results). Lots of things tried to be super realistic and made for a worse game (boat rides, markets, etc). But they worked exactly as intended.
So not really a lack of institutional memory there I think... (not even sure that would apply anyways since it seems like they lacked for anyone with experience in MMOs making design decisions)
They didn't lack for MMO experience. It's just that their MMO experience was FF11, and they self-admit in the No Clip documentary that they basically just ignored WoW as a dev team and were not prepared for how WoW rocket propelled the smoothness of the MMO experience forward.
New World is also not the first PvP focused MMO to be hilariously broken and seemingly unfixable by it's dev team. Shadowbane anyone?
Yeah, I meant Amazon's devs lacking experience - XIV's woes were a different matter.
The Conan MMO was also rather famous for (at launch) having an awesome first 20 levels, then very barebones after that, and at level 40 there was very little content at all. Max level was 80.
It also had awesome fatatalities, something I wish other MMO's would take. It was sweet when you killing mob number 10000 to do it with a little flourish. I played an assassin and they had a sweet like slice a dude up a million times and finish with your dagger stuck in their neck you casually pull out as they fall down behind you.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I think you all need to look on the bright side and take solace in the fact that these problems just mean AGS will learn and totally get Lost Ark's launch right as a result, right?
Lost Ark is a fully developed game that already has a successful release in South Korea. Also: it isn’t developed by AGS. They are merely publishing it and handling the servers. No direct line of comparison can be made.
Bonus topic: Amazon could still screw up the server deployment and launch. But if the game itself is bad, that’s not on them.
I actually used my free transfer to move away from a medium-high pop server to a super low one in my zone. When the itch strikes, I can leisurely gather/craft and finish leveling and treat it like a weird single player minecraft/valheim experience. I'll just load up various town storage chests with mats and if they ever figure out server mergers for real, I'll rejoin the noise and see how it feels. With no sub or functional cash shop, it's not like it costs me anything to goof off in a dead world. My only 2 issues are difficulty advancing the main storyline if I ever want to and being stuck as an underdog color (purple controls the entire map, so can't change from yellow to purple and changing to green does me no favors). Neither one of those seems worth the trouble at this point.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I uninstalled this over the weekend. Got to around level 30 before I lost the motivation to keep going. With all the issues, both technical and design, especially at the top level around how the PvP works it just didn't keep me motivated to keep the grind up. Since there's no sub I'm sure I'll occasionally check in and get a few hours of mindless grinding out of it from time to time but for now I'm done.
Well the setting is a tiny island of the coast of South America, instead of the mainland proper, so everyone having already died (and become skellington) from whatever it is that keeps taking out later european colonists makes it somewhat better.
Instead of "we go in and murder the natives and that is good".
The Conan MMO was also rather famous for (at launch) having an awesome first 20 levels, then very barebones after that, and at level 40 there was very little content at all. Max level was 80.
It also had awesome fatatalities, something I wish other MMO's would take. It was sweet when you killing mob number 10000 to do it with a little flourish. I played an assassin and they had a sweet like slice a dude up a million times and finish with your dagger stuck in their neck you casually pull out as they fall down behind you.
I don't remember the weapon/class anymore, but one of the fatalities (against another player anyway) involved grabbing the other dudes head and pulling it off. A bare handed decapitation, lol
The Conan MMO was also rather famous for (at launch) having an awesome first 20 levels, then very barebones after that, and at level 40 there was very little content at all. Max level was 80.
It also had awesome fatatalities, something I wish other MMO's would take. It was sweet when you killing mob number 10000 to do it with a little flourish. I played an assassin and they had a sweet like slice a dude up a million times and finish with your dagger stuck in their neck you casually pull out as they fall down behind you.
I don't remember the weapon/class anymore, but one of the fatalities (against another player anyway) involved grabbing the other dudes head and pulling it off. A bare handed decapitation, lol
Two hand hammer.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I guess I like suffering, because I keep popping in to try it out. I think part of me doesn't want to quit entirely until I've gotten to level 60 and at least tried everything once.
I'm 50 now, and I'm totally broke. All of my gear is too expensive to repair, no one is buying much in the market, and bulk listing even low end stuff gets eaten up by listing and trading fees. I can't craft Tier IV repair kits yet because my Engineering isn't high enough, and I don't have many solo quests left to provide me gold in zones I can survive. The elite quests I've overleveled are still hilariously hard (Papa Bear can eat it!).
It's a super weird sargasso. I think I'll have to basically just play semi-naked and scrape together coin farming low/mid level farms/villages for mob coin drops, specialty herbs and food, and tier 1 mats and converters and then do low end town boards. Worst case, I just farm iron, undercut, and wait for the coins to trickle in. Well, that, and do my daily cov missions, which net a little chunk of cash with the 10x multiplier.
I've said this before, but as an ultra-casual in this game who invests 2 hours a week (or less) into it, I've had nothing but good experiences.
My only negative experience is a community one. Purple team seems to have either all quit, or all transferred, or all gotten banned, or a combination of all of the above, because my faction just doesn't have a presence anymore.
My server is being very odd when it comes to pvp, in a good way.
When green started to heavily dominate, to the point where it was obviously overbalanced, a portion of the Marauders actually switched faction to Covenant, to make sure things stayed competitive.
So yellow and green are pretty even now, but purple only has one territory left. So green and yellow both decided that unless purple takes something else, they're not going to war that one last purple territory. And when one green company decided they weren't gonna abide by that pushing war in that territory by themselves, all the other greens who were in the war showed up -naked-, just to drive home the point that they were letting purple keep Weavers Fen.
There was even an armistice for Thanksgiving/Black Friday that was actually upheld, no one pushed territories on the days before so that there were no wars on that Thursday or Friday, just so people could enjoy the holiday.
I don't Pvp, like, at all, but its interesting to see how things are shaking out when compared to how other servers seem to go.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
I guess I like suffering, because I keep popping in to try it out. I think part of me doesn't want to quit entirely until I've gotten to level 60 and at least tried everything once.
I'm 50 now, and I'm totally broke. All of my gear is too expensive to repair, no one is buying much in the market, and bulk listing even low end stuff gets eaten up by listing and trading fees. I can't craft Tier IV repair kits yet because my Engineering isn't high enough, and I don't have many solo quests left to provide me gold in zones I can survive. The elite quests I've overleveled are still hilariously hard (Papa Bear can eat it!).
It's a super weird sargasso. I think I'll have to basically just play semi-naked and scrape together coin farming low/mid level farms/villages for mob coin drops, specialty herbs and food, and tier 1 mats and converters and then do low end town boards. Worst case, I just farm iron, undercut, and wait for the coins to trickle in. Well, that, and do my daily cov missions, which net a little chunk of cash with the 10x multiplier.
The rent and repair is just too damn high.
It is practically cheaper to just… buy new gear when your stuff breaks.
Pre-60 stuff is rarely more than 25-30g on my tiny server.
For dead-broke, fishing is probably your best money maker. Med and Lg salmon are for board missions (also tadpole), as well as all three varieties of fish filet.
Or just flip over flint and pick reeds. Both are the source of the best bait, so just sell those! Glowworm Bait is like 5g each (ymmv)
You don’t *need* bait, or even a hotspot. Also the xp isn’t bad, and your armor and weapons don’t get busted.
Also those town board missions are good xp and are usually pretty easy.
I guess I like suffering, because I keep popping in to try it out. I think part of me doesn't want to quit entirely until I've gotten to level 60 and at least tried everything once.
I'm 50 now, and I'm totally broke. All of my gear is too expensive to repair, no one is buying much in the market, and bulk listing even low end stuff gets eaten up by listing and trading fees. I can't craft Tier IV repair kits yet because my Engineering isn't high enough, and I don't have many solo quests left to provide me gold in zones I can survive. The elite quests I've overleveled are still hilariously hard (Papa Bear can eat it!).
It's a super weird sargasso. I think I'll have to basically just play semi-naked and scrape together coin farming low/mid level farms/villages for mob coin drops, specialty herbs and food, and tier 1 mats and converters and then do low end town boards. Worst case, I just farm iron, undercut, and wait for the coins to trickle in. Well, that, and do my daily cov missions, which net a little chunk of cash with the 10x multiplier.
The rent and repair is just too damn high.
It is practically cheaper to just… buy new gear when your stuff breaks.
Pre-60 stuff is rarely more than 25-30g on my tiny server.
For dead-broke, fishing is probably your best money maker. Med and Lg salmon are for board missions (also tadpole), as well as all three varieties of fish filet.
Or just flip over flint and pick reeds. Both are the source of the best bait, so just sell those! Glowworm Bait is like 5g each (ymmv)
You don’t *need* bait, or even a hotspot. Also the xp isn’t bad, and your armor and weapons don’t get busted.
Also those town board missions are good xp and are usually pretty easy.
Thanks! I only just tried fishing for the first time recently. It's fun in that waste of time MMO kinda way. I'll check it our more since the server I'm on is so quiet.
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
edited December 2021
Has PA already bounced hard off this MMO like we usually do? Or do we have a guild somewhere? I just logged after a couple weeks off and my server is so dead I don't even see people in a main city walking around. Any suggestions? The only server I see with a queue right now is Eden. I don't want another dead server, but I don't necessarily want the busiest one either.
I am watching New World in the same sense that I am "watching" Star Citizen, I have no interest in the purported product but it's hard to look away from a train mid-derailment
I won't claim to understand all of it as I never made it to the end but these Reddit threads seem to indicate they are changing the item levels. And apparently watermarks are the going-forward items to go for. Basically killing a reason to do high level crafting.
Yes that’s correct. We’ll have to see how it plays in the PTR, but essentially the system is now:
You kill end game mobs for drops. They have a chance to drop at a higher lvl than what you currently have (previously called “High Water Mark” now called “Mastery Level”). If you craft a piece of gear at 600, but you only have mastery of 520, that crafted 600 gear gets treated as 520 when you equip it.
What used to happen was companies would gear out new 60s with crafter 590+ gear, so they can hang in endgame content. They could then participate in wars/end game PVE and hopefully score some god-roll 600 gear. Now they want you to do the grind all the way from 500 to 600 I guess. Also there is a mastery lvl for every weapon type and armour that needs to be levelled individually
They have introduced an item you can craft once per day to boost your mastery lvl on a specific item type, so there’s that. They also made it easier to craft correctly rolled gear, so there’s that at least
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
They hit the “oh fuck crafted gear is ruining our game“ point even earlier than most MMOs. It turns out you can’t have crafting be your primary source of gear unless your crafting system is very grindy or your crafting mats come from a grindy system like dungeons. Or you just don’t care about gear, but you’d better be really confident in your PvP system engagement for that.
They hit the “oh fuck crafted gear is ruining our game“ point even earlier than most MMOs. It turns out you can’t have crafting be your primary source of gear unless your crafting system is very grindy or your crafting mats come from a grindy system like dungeons. Or you just don’t care about gear, but you’d better be really confident in your PvP system engagement for that.
Which would be cool, but one of the things they promised is making crafting matter and that crafters would be important, so that's already pissing off a good chunk of their remaining players.
Crafting already was way grindier than doing high watermark grinding.
On top of the new system (which sounds ok), in January sometime they’re going to make all your *existing* gear scale DOWN to whatever your watermark is. Which if you went the crafting route (or trading/buying) will be absolute dogwater.
And that is a super shitty thing to do to your playerbase (what’s left of it).
Seems like it comes back around to them never having a core vision of what the game was. Because originally the game was open world PvP to control harvesting to drive player economy crafting, but then they just walked completely away from that.
I'm still chugging along at 54 on my dead server (Aukumea). I've figured out how to subsist on town boards, salvaging equipment, and covenant quests for repair cash. It's definitely scratching some kind of itch while I wait and see if FF14 ever lets new players in or GW2's expac drops in February.
The biggest issue I'm seeing is dying towns make it a real pain if you set up a storage location there. I just had to move my cooking and alchemy from First Light up to Everfall because the First Light overloads jacked everything up to Extreme and let the town die (I assume they are moving away from the server or just know that no one can challenge them). It's extra suck because I've got 40 town standing down there, and like...8 in the other zones.
You can also hit a real wall if your server starts losing high-level crafting stations. On our tiny server, we're lucky if we have even one Tier 5 for each station.
For instance we have a single Tier 5 kitchen, and it was down for almost a week when the town lost an invasion (as we lose all invasions) and built it back up again.
Server merges beginning! I'm very curious to see how this all goes. Time to spend the next coupla weeks collecting high value items and stashing them for the smoosh. It's going to be an utter nightmare going from gathering whatever I want to fighting with 30 people for a hyssop node, but at least I'll be able to find groups!
I suspect the additions of Even Moar Grind, on top of Already Too Much Grind isn’t going to help player retention.
If they’d just… Not do this upcoming patch for a month people might actually start enjoying it.
But no, AGS keeps sticking their fingers in electrical sockets. At least they haven’t shut down the trading post for a while.
Yeah, the upcoming changes on everything from House Tax reversion to Expertise recalibration to Gear Score expanding to 625 is just so opposite what any current player wants. It's not surprising, but it's a bummer, because the last few weeks have actually been kind of fun in game - no major catastrophes, technically successful server merges, and basic systems have been actually working.
I'm still playing as a gatherer/crafter. I just kill and skin me some boars and loot some chests in the little time I spend on it, and frankly it's still a lot of fun, even with the grind (I just hit 187 armoring, and I am bathed in the blood of a LEGION of boars - it's utterly absurd how many resources you waste to level this...it all gets salvaged anyway). The added mastery to max tradeskills is great and lets me play with some legendary components without having to poopsock and/or stack luck on every piece of armor and pray for RNG. The gypsum that comes with it has let me slowly improve my main weapons expertise a little each day, which is more than sufficient for someone like me who doesn't really engage in challenging content at the moment.
Our server merge (Aukumea -> Mag Mell) initially was pretty good with a nice split of factions owning territories. Green got taken over by what is essentially an RMT shell company and the remaining resistance used their transfer tokens to either get out or join green, so now it's a totally green map with the exception of Ebon, which will fall soon. This has also led to some really gross anti-asian chat on top of the already sketch community. On the upside, a lot more people means I can sell resources and actually go out and kill stuff without worrying about repair or tax money, which is how the stupid game should have been from the start.
All in all, it's still dog shit, but it's free and sometimes kind of fun dog shit?
Straygatsby on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
the duping glitches permanently destroyed the economy and also allowed for single companies to have a hegemonic control on most servers
they needed to do server rollbacks to have any hope of long term game health, and they didn't
adding more grind has essentially sealed the deal
+1
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
it had like a million players at launch, so yeah it's still got like 70-100k peak players, but that's over 90% player loss in 3 months
that's catastrophic
Remember though, the game isn’t a Sub or F2P MMO. It had a $40 USD price tag and an estimated 16 million people bought it to date.
That is a crazy good financial success.
And while it certainly has had a considerable drop off, its player base is still solid. At the time of writing it is #5 on the Steam Charts and considering it does have a cash shop the game is very likely quite lucrative.
Now I have serious doubts if they'll ever be able to turn the game in to something, uh, good? But as far as the money-men are concerned the game did its job and then some.
edit- Or to put it another way;
We players consider "success" to be a product that is fun and engaging.
Companies consider "success" to be a product that makes a bunch of money, quality does not even cross their minds.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I hear all the horror stories of other servers but the one I'm on is still exceedingly healthy.
The map is a mix of colors, with a shifting count between Green and Yellow, with Purple holding at 2 zones. And the companies that hold zones are all independent, not shells companies of a larger one. Green is actually the smallest faction numbers wise, but they hold both Everfall and Windsward, and Purple is the faction with the most bodies, but they mostly pride themselves on PvE prowess and not PvP. The agreement between the major companies that no color will be pushed off the map holds, so if Purple loses control of a zone then no wars will be made to take their last holding. Also both the Thanksgiving and Christmas armistice agreements held, meaning people held off faction pushes so that no wars happened on those days so people could enjoy time with their families.
I actually got in to the company that has owned Everfall for over three months now (and only Everfall, with no plans to try for anything else), and they actually have rules against being toxic and cheating. And none of the money made from the town gets RMT'd. They're a shockingly nice group of folks, especially considering that they're some of the most dominating PvPers on the server. The most vicious I've ever seen them is when a a newly merged company that was openly racist warred Everfall, and they were extremely eager to 'crush some fucking Nazis'.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
Posts
Ahhh, I misunderstood.
It also had awesome fatatalities, something I wish other MMO's would take. It was sweet when you killing mob number 10000 to do it with a little flourish. I played an assassin and they had a sweet like slice a dude up a million times and finish with your dagger stuck in their neck you casually pull out as they fall down behind you.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Bonus topic: Amazon could still screw up the server deployment and launch. But if the game itself is bad, that’s not on them.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Instead of "we go in and murder the natives and that is good".
I don't remember the weapon/class anymore, but one of the fatalities (against another player anyway) involved grabbing the other dudes head and pulling it off. A bare handed decapitation, lol
Two hand hammer.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I'm 50 now, and I'm totally broke. All of my gear is too expensive to repair, no one is buying much in the market, and bulk listing even low end stuff gets eaten up by listing and trading fees. I can't craft Tier IV repair kits yet because my Engineering isn't high enough, and I don't have many solo quests left to provide me gold in zones I can survive. The elite quests I've overleveled are still hilariously hard (Papa Bear can eat it!).
It's a super weird sargasso. I think I'll have to basically just play semi-naked and scrape together coin farming low/mid level farms/villages for mob coin drops, specialty herbs and food, and tier 1 mats and converters and then do low end town boards. Worst case, I just farm iron, undercut, and wait for the coins to trickle in. Well, that, and do my daily cov missions, which net a little chunk of cash with the 10x multiplier.
The rent and repair is just too damn high.
My only negative experience is a community one. Purple team seems to have either all quit, or all transferred, or all gotten banned, or a combination of all of the above, because my faction just doesn't have a presence anymore.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
When green started to heavily dominate, to the point where it was obviously overbalanced, a portion of the Marauders actually switched faction to Covenant, to make sure things stayed competitive.
So yellow and green are pretty even now, but purple only has one territory left. So green and yellow both decided that unless purple takes something else, they're not going to war that one last purple territory. And when one green company decided they weren't gonna abide by that pushing war in that territory by themselves, all the other greens who were in the war showed up -naked-, just to drive home the point that they were letting purple keep Weavers Fen.
There was even an armistice for Thanksgiving/Black Friday that was actually upheld, no one pushed territories on the days before so that there were no wars on that Thursday or Friday, just so people could enjoy the holiday.
I don't Pvp, like, at all, but its interesting to see how things are shaking out when compared to how other servers seem to go.
It is practically cheaper to just… buy new gear when your stuff breaks.
Pre-60 stuff is rarely more than 25-30g on my tiny server.
For dead-broke, fishing is probably your best money maker. Med and Lg salmon are for board missions (also tadpole), as well as all three varieties of fish filet.
Or just flip over flint and pick reeds. Both are the source of the best bait, so just sell those! Glowworm Bait is like 5g each (ymmv)
You don’t *need* bait, or even a hotspot. Also the xp isn’t bad, and your armor and weapons don’t get busted.
Also those town board missions are good xp and are usually pretty easy.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Thanks! I only just tried fishing for the first time recently. It's fun in that waste of time MMO kinda way. I'll check it our more since the server I'm on is so quiet.
edit: just read the OP. That's...not a good sign.
I'm still hopeful that they can eventually turn this around and make a good game.
I also think that it will serve as a object lesson on how NOT to develop a MMO for many generations.
https://forums.newworld.com/t/december-ptr-patch-notes/622811?u=commander_aze
I won't claim to understand all of it as I never made it to the end but these Reddit threads seem to indicate they are changing the item levels. And apparently watermarks are the going-forward items to go for. Basically killing a reason to do high level crafting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/r7v2zd/todays_announced_changes_mean_i_will_never_log_in
You kill end game mobs for drops. They have a chance to drop at a higher lvl than what you currently have (previously called “High Water Mark” now called “Mastery Level”). If you craft a piece of gear at 600, but you only have mastery of 520, that crafted 600 gear gets treated as 520 when you equip it.
What used to happen was companies would gear out new 60s with crafter 590+ gear, so they can hang in endgame content. They could then participate in wars/end game PVE and hopefully score some god-roll 600 gear. Now they want you to do the grind all the way from 500 to 600 I guess. Also there is a mastery lvl for every weapon type and armour that needs to be levelled individually
They have introduced an item you can craft once per day to boost your mastery lvl on a specific item type, so there’s that. They also made it easier to craft correctly rolled gear, so there’s that at least
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Which would be cool, but one of the things they promised is making crafting matter and that crafters would be important, so that's already pissing off a good chunk of their remaining players.
On top of the new system (which sounds ok), in January sometime they’re going to make all your *existing* gear scale DOWN to whatever your watermark is. Which if you went the crafting route (or trading/buying) will be absolute dogwater.
And that is a super shitty thing to do to your playerbase (what’s left of it).
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Luckily Lost Ark is free to play and you don't need to pay to enjoy it.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
The biggest issue I'm seeing is dying towns make it a real pain if you set up a storage location there. I just had to move my cooking and alchemy from First Light up to Everfall because the First Light overloads jacked everything up to Extreme and let the town die (I assume they are moving away from the server or just know that no one can challenge them). It's extra suck because I've got 40 town standing down there, and like...8 in the other zones.
For instance we have a single Tier 5 kitchen, and it was down for almost a week when the town lost an invasion (as we lose all invasions) and built it back up again.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Honestly, someway somehow, this game is still pretty firmly in Steam's top 10 played. Currently 11th, but it is off time. Still higher than Warframe.
Truly one of life's mysteries.
that's catastrophic
If they’d just… Not do this upcoming patch for a month people might actually start enjoying it.
But no, AGS keeps sticking their fingers in electrical sockets. At least they haven’t shut down the trading post for a while.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Yeah, the upcoming changes on everything from House Tax reversion to Expertise recalibration to Gear Score expanding to 625 is just so opposite what any current player wants. It's not surprising, but it's a bummer, because the last few weeks have actually been kind of fun in game - no major catastrophes, technically successful server merges, and basic systems have been actually working.
I'm still playing as a gatherer/crafter. I just kill and skin me some boars and loot some chests in the little time I spend on it, and frankly it's still a lot of fun, even with the grind (I just hit 187 armoring, and I am bathed in the blood of a LEGION of boars - it's utterly absurd how many resources you waste to level this...it all gets salvaged anyway). The added mastery to max tradeskills is great and lets me play with some legendary components without having to poopsock and/or stack luck on every piece of armor and pray for RNG. The gypsum that comes with it has let me slowly improve my main weapons expertise a little each day, which is more than sufficient for someone like me who doesn't really engage in challenging content at the moment.
Our server merge (Aukumea -> Mag Mell) initially was pretty good with a nice split of factions owning territories. Green got taken over by what is essentially an RMT shell company and the remaining resistance used their transfer tokens to either get out or join green, so now it's a totally green map with the exception of Ebon, which will fall soon. This has also led to some really gross anti-asian chat on top of the already sketch community. On the upside, a lot more people means I can sell resources and actually go out and kill stuff without worrying about repair or tax money, which is how the stupid game should have been from the start.
All in all, it's still dog shit, but it's free and sometimes kind of fun dog shit?
they needed to do server rollbacks to have any hope of long term game health, and they didn't
adding more grind has essentially sealed the deal
Remember though, the game isn’t a Sub or F2P MMO. It had a $40 USD price tag and an estimated 16 million people bought it to date.
That is a crazy good financial success.
And while it certainly has had a considerable drop off, its player base is still solid. At the time of writing it is #5 on the Steam Charts and considering it does have a cash shop the game is very likely quite lucrative.
Now I have serious doubts if they'll ever be able to turn the game in to something, uh, good? But as far as the money-men are concerned the game did its job and then some.
edit- Or to put it another way;
We players consider "success" to be a product that is fun and engaging.
Companies consider "success" to be a product that makes a bunch of money, quality does not even cross their minds.
The map is a mix of colors, with a shifting count between Green and Yellow, with Purple holding at 2 zones. And the companies that hold zones are all independent, not shells companies of a larger one. Green is actually the smallest faction numbers wise, but they hold both Everfall and Windsward, and Purple is the faction with the most bodies, but they mostly pride themselves on PvE prowess and not PvP. The agreement between the major companies that no color will be pushed off the map holds, so if Purple loses control of a zone then no wars will be made to take their last holding. Also both the Thanksgiving and Christmas armistice agreements held, meaning people held off faction pushes so that no wars happened on those days so people could enjoy time with their families.
I actually got in to the company that has owned Everfall for over three months now (and only Everfall, with no plans to try for anything else), and they actually have rules against being toxic and cheating. And none of the money made from the town gets RMT'd. They're a shockingly nice group of folks, especially considering that they're some of the most dominating PvPers on the server. The most vicious I've ever seen them is when a a newly merged company that was openly racist warred Everfall, and they were extremely eager to 'crush some fucking Nazis'.