Quote Originally Posted by Ransu View Post
This is patently false.
Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
Except that the middle part of that isn't true at all, and the beginning and the end are meant to be misleading. Population is still at several hundreds of thousands of players in NA alone (and close to a million worldwide), which is significantly higher than it was during the "troughs" of ShB. "Retention" as a % is lower during EW for the same reason that the peak at the start was so high - there was a huge influx of new players, many of whom simply aren't the target audience of this game. A fair number did become fans anyway, and have stuck around, which is a good part of why overall #'s are higher, but many realized this wasn't their preferred style of game and moved on (which is expected). That's not an issue with the game itself, as every game naturally has a certain focus and a certain target audience.

Heck, even several of the bitter negative echo chamber around here whose entire existence seems to be whining about every single part of this game 24/7 went away for a bit...and are now back. We've been seeing the typical trends throughout EW, which continues to re-spike at every patch like normal (it's not continuing to trend downwards, but doing the usual cyclical rise and fall).