Quote Originally Posted by SXTC View Post
As a recruiter I notice there's less and less overall activity on the game. Where I used to see 10 people online 3 years ago, there's 3 online today.
Anecdotal, tbh. I see lots of people online and it's because of the type of people I put on my friends list:
  • RPers.
  • Hunters, who enjoy hunting all year long.
  • Collectors, who find lots of content to do due to being engulfed in grinds that casual players ignore.
  • People who actually enjoy raiding and do it for months on end, as opposed to just raidlogging the latest raids.
Every time it's the same... a patch is released with end game content and story... players get busy doing that and 2 weeks later they have completed it and are tired of it after which they don't sub again for 2 months
Always been that way because the core patch content (MSQ, alliance raid, normal content) is designed for the casual gamer that plays DLC for a few days after release then moves onto the next game that had a DLC release, which is how most people play games from what I've observed on Steam.
you have to skip 3-4 months of sub just to have a few weeks of serious social activity simply because people don't stick around.
Still anecdotal because I find social activity year round. You are looking in the wrong places for it.

You will not find much social interaction from casual players who quit 3 days after a patch release. You'll find it from the more hardcore crowd that nolife the game year-round - hunters, collectors, RPers, MINE communities, those sorts. It has always been that way.
- The floor is lava
- Hide & seek
- Riddle event
- FC vs FC pvp (this could get it's separate ranking)
- etc... every 1-3 patches they could add a new mini game.
Those are good ideas and the sad thing is they've done fun things like this with the All Saint's Wake and Valentione's events, yet it doesn't occur to them to do anything like it outside those events.