Is this game slowly dying?

[TouchandFeel]

For the most part innovation happens in tiny trickles not huge leaps and bounds, so often all the little innovations go unnoticed as they slip under the radar.

However as far as MMO's go, player expectations are in a way the killers of innovation. We all say that we want huge innovation in the genre, but in the end if things are innovative or different we become uncomfortable with it and don't like it and want it to be more like what we were used to in some previous MMO that we liked.

IMO the best way to move the genre forward is to pull from all the other little innovations that other MMO's have done and implement them into your MMO in a cohesive and entertaining manner.

[Felessan]

Yoshida himself said that creations of new FC's is 'gently decreasing' so yeah, I think its at the point where most people have tried it and got bored with it.

This means nothing. Maximum that you can get from this is that influx of new players is slowing down. There is no information about whether it still above of outflow of players or not. And even this information are not guaranteed as FC space becomes saturated and for newbies that outside of "we are group of friends so we need a separate new FC" there are a little need to create a *new* FC.

All the 1.0 players I knew are all gone, got bored, etc. I think most people are waiting to see if the expansion can save their faith in the game.

I know several people from 1.0 that are still here (both from casual and hardcore raiding crowd) and will be here in 2.4. Some of them are "long-term committed", thus unlikely to quit even if 2.4 fails to meet excessive expectations.

Our FC, which is on top of specific "food chain" (it's a language-based raiding FC) have roughly the same number of players for last 6 months. And raiders are the most volatile and easy to move out part of population.