playerbase down 25% in 4 months?

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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.

Sometimes I think it would have been better for them to take the game offline, get player feedback as they did, put the new team in place as they did... and then just dig in and get some serious work done for the next year.

Do another closed beta *only* with those who were shown to provide useful feedback in the previous beta cycle. That is, not people looking to jump into the game so they can play for 10 minutes and then immediately start spamming every forum they know of with "The game still sucks! It's gonna fail!".. because we know those people exist and that their sad little lives revolve around such crap... But I digress...

Do betas in "cycles" with each cycle very specifically focused on specific mechanics and systems. I know they did this in the actual betas, but it wasn't really "focused". It was the same general beta, but with SE asking people to please test "this system" or "that system". Many people were only concerned with making as much progress as they could before the game went retail, playing it as though it were the live release.

During this beta period, *listen* to the feedback - the useful feedback that is (it's always important to distinguish the signal from the noise; to recognize whether feedback is truly helpful for the game, or merely an individual wanting it changed to suit them personally) - and make adjustments. Do *not* go the route of "Well it's working as designed and people will see how it all works out fine in live release..." as Tanaka did.

That was a *huge* mistake on his part, especially considering even after live, people had exactly the same complaints... only there were more of them, and now it was too late to do something about it. The cat was out of bag and the milk was spilt. He assured people the shortcomings we saw were "only because we were seeing 10% of the complete game"... only for us to find out that wasn't true; that what we saw in Beta was exactly what we would see in release.

It was tragic the way he mis-handled the feedback he got in Beta. A lot of it was *very* poignant and *very* good feedback, especially in hindsight. There have been some very intelligent and insightful people in this game's community.. especially during beta.

I think if they were to go back into dev mode and proceed on the path they're on now, with the approach Yoshi's been taking, it would do much better for them.

Some people may disagree because it would have prevented them from playing it in the short-term. I personally believe - and this is just my feeling - that it would have served the game far better in the long term if they'd done that.

Rather than getting burned out on lack of content, repetitive environments and so forth... Anticipation would have built up for it again. People would be more and more curious about what changes they were making, etc. It wouldn't have been "in their face" every moment, so their curiosity would keep them engaged.

Just my two cents though.