Quote Originally Posted by DPZ2 View Post
Considering that Tera currently has an average of about 20 players a day this month after Gameforge announced the shutdown of servers at the end of June 2022, one cannot say that the game was super successful in drawing players with its gameplay. Still, #32 out of the top 134 MMOs isn't bad for the genre.
The long term success and health of MMOs is a complex beast and there's far more to than simply 'is the gameplay good'.

Two great examples of this would be Everquest and Warhammer Online:

Everquest is what you would call a Horizontal Progression MMO. Old content and equipment generally isn't automatically rendered obsolete with a new content drop or expansion and as such, these games can survive mass player exoduses on a comparative shoestring budget. As long as the publisher is willing to keep a skeleton development team there to keep things ticking over, these types of MMOs will generally endure irrespective of how good or bad they are comparitively. UO, EQ1, FFXI, even KR Lineage are a testament to this.

Warhammer Online is a Vertical Progress or Theme Park MMO as popularised by World of Warcraft. These kinds of MMOs will typically render old content and equipment obsolete in a hurry. Old content tends to be trivialised and/or simply worthless outside of achievements, titles and glamours. Thus a much faster pace of development post launch is absolutely required. Where FFXIV and WoW are examples of where this has been done well, Warhammer Online was the poster child for a game with amazing potential, great gameplay and truly unique PvP that floundered post launch and promptly died out due to not getting nearly enough new content post launch.

Korean potion guzzlers are no exception, who the blame lays with is irrelevant really. The game wasn't getting fresh content. Large swathes of prior content was worthless. The end result is a dead game.