Loosing players after update?

[MageBlack]

-snip-

I understand where you are coming from and how things may seem like ghost towns compared to a month or two ago. There might be other reasons for a particular area that used to be crowded to no long seem as busy. At launch, you couldnt even get a claim on a lady bug out of the gates cause, thats where every one was at that point. Eventually people progressed and the main clump moved further and further up the ladder. When FC housing was implemented, again it looked like people were missing, but many of them were busy in the new wards and housing (those rich bastards...) or in dungeons trying to get money for a house. Now again a new housing patch dropped and while the prices are high, people have more time to get money for them and the wards are once again quite busy. Also, there is the usual ebb and flow of the player base. New content gets dropped in the major patch, people come back to check it out, play it, then drift off until the next patch. In addition, there have been some big title releases recently that will naturally draw some people away for a time (Destiny, ArchAge) as well as school starting up this month.

Now this is not a general rule or anything, just some circumstances to consider when making the claim that " the game is dying/the game is hemorrhaging players" as some people put it. As though this is some kind of fear they are using to try and validate the changes they want as some kind of savior to the games success. I am inclined to see what the census says regarding population vs subs vs active accounts. But even that is not a completely accurate look at the actual population in the game because it cannot properly take into account extenuating circumstances such as RMT or people who log in once a week for 30 min.

Personally, I see the game have its ups and downs but i don't see it dying off completely. People like to blame things on "PS limitations" but if anything it is something that would do more for keeping the game alive than to kill it in the long run. It is an almost completely untouched medium for the MMO genre and will have people playing who might not normally. I feel the game has at least drawn in a stable crowd that will be sticking around for quite some time to come. The devs have plans outlined all the way up to 4.0 at the very least, if not further by now. So barring any major disasters, like all their servers somehow being physically destroyed, I don't see the game disappearing or going free to play. And the game would be shut down before ever going free to play.

Just my 2gil.