What is the point of Overworld in the game?

[Eraden]

The "boom and bust" cycle is pretty much working as intended, if one believes the numerous statements made to that effect by its Producer.

The population has been pretty stable, although you might not notice it if you don't pay attention to DPS queue times throughout any given day on North American servers.

Housing might seem like a wonderful way to encourage players to visit more. Housing in other games has always been more of a "it's available, I tried it out, I have many that I haven't visited since <MMO> lost popularity" for almost every MMO I've played that has housing. I have apartments and FC rooms in this game, and don't make a point of actually going to them even on a monthly basis. It's not the draw you think it might be.

GW2 has a problem with population. It seems stable because there are dedicated players who really enjoy the game, plus a smattering of come-and-go players who enter and leave without much fuss or bother. The people who still play it actively every day are familiar. The people (like me) who visit it once every two or three months make hardly a blip in the numbers logging in. This is why smaller population MMOs that have been around for a while don't seem to have that "boom or bust" cycle. There is no longer a reason for a "boom". Just a population that enjoys the game the way it is.

I think you skipped the part where I said that we need to find out what actually interests the people who come and go as part of the "boom and bust" cycle. The idea of housing was just an example of one thing that might keep players involved over a longer period of time but honestly I don't know if that is a thing that the transients are even interested in. We need to find out what they want. As for the population, no it has NOT been stable. At the beginning of Endwalker there were ques as high as 5000 and people were constantly getting kicked while waiting in que. Even if they managed to get in to the game, it was HOURS of wait time. On occasion the login servers would crash. Now you can get in easily with almost no ques at all as activity has shrunk to a fraction of what it was at the start of Endwalker. This is NOT healthy for this game and it causes people to get very upset and in some cases, abandon the game altogether. I personally know several people who gave up at the start of Endwalker and have never come back to the game. Contrast that with GW2's End of Dragons. I play GW2 as well and I have had no problems at all getting into the game at launch. As for GW2's population, even prior to the launch of End of Dragons, on the server that I play on there was always a healthy amount of people in Lion's Arch and in a lot of adventuring zones as well.