playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

[Peregrine]

I'm not surprised. i know the dev team is working their asses off because their jobs likely depend on this game succeeding, but development takes a long time, and players' patience is not nearly as long. I don't want to believe it, but this game may have been doomed from launch even if what Yoshida said about not having to please investors is true. I have trouble seeing how SE will develop enough content that's both quality enough to be fun and sufficient to occupy players, since the game shipped with almost none. It feels like they'd need a whole other development team just for adding content until it gets to an acceptable level, then they could continue with the standard one, but this game's been a big enough monetary drag on SE as is so I doubt that'll happen.

As an earlier post mentioned, the next few patches would probably have to be dynamite to keep this game at a "fair" population even if it is free. Hell, I have more to do on some F2P games than I do on this one right now, and the slow slog to rank 50 doesn't help motivation.

Basically if we don't start getting a game people would easily pay 13 bucks a month for, no one is going to play it for free. There is no demand for a free bad game. You would have to start paying people to play it to increase demand. 12 bucks a month and free are the same to people who care more about quality than price. And that's almost everyone when you're talking about forgoing one large pizza a month, or getting one more pizza a month. We don't care about the sub fee. No one does. It just looks silly to try to charge for industry substandard product.

It's not about the money. People don't play bad games even if they're free. This game's subscription fee has nothing to do with who plays. If 12 bucks a month is worth that much to you to play a low-caliber game, you shouldn't be playing MMOs.

Maybe SE is perfectly fine with players all kindof quitting so they can continue to retool it in relative peace. They don't seem too worried that free isn't even keeping people around. Dunno if that's confidence or they're just too broken by the ongoing performance to even mount a response any more but to keep their head down and barrel on.