I love this game and I'm a bit disappointed to see how quickly friends are quitting. I'll just keep this short and to the point. The #1 issue this game has, aside from the obvious lack of QA time to catch bugs, is population density. It's incredibly difficult to find fights anytime but prime time on my server and the people who are on during non prime time hours spend more time back capping objectives on continents with no resistance. This game desperately needs mechanics to A) encourage fighting, B) incentive's to go to continents where they are outmatched, and C) fix server population issues. I know they put up a lot of extra servers to deal with the day 1 deluge, but that almost means they are incredibly unlikely to merge the servers to give people sufficient population density to create a good play experience. This game will either live or die based on the quality and frequency of fighting players experience. If they don't take a hard line to course correct this issue they will lose a lot of their player base and be unable to recover it. This is all of course assuming they are more concerned with the long term retention than they are with the immediate cash grab of high churn players.
People are quitting IMHO because the rewards vs. time spent (cert vs. hours) is way off. Not worth the effort once you figure out how long it will take you to keep earning things past 1 loadout for 1 class. Also the imbalances (air superiority) are taking too long to fix - this isnt a game where they can take their time and fix it over the next few months. Imbalances need to be addressed immediately so that people dont walk away from it like they are doing. I think its too late, SOE is trying to approach this game with the wrong mindset in a few ways and i dont think they will ever see population rebound like they think might happen.
My concern is that instead of giving players server transfers or merging servers what they will instead try to do is get more new people into the game to fill out those servers. If that is the case the people who are currently playing will have quit and moved on before they have a chance to turn things around. This game shipped several months to early, it's riddled with bugs and the ones that exist weren't fixed in the most recent patch not to mention the massive amount of new bugs they implemented. The fact that they tried to sell a car horn that didn't even work baffles me. How do these builds get QA sign off, do they at all or does this game get limited QA resources? I'm not even going to get into the game balance, for the most part I think it's pretty decent but things like the recent changes to vehicle traction after I spent a lot of money on ******* out my tank or the recent introduction of weapon replacements for the weapons people already had that they nurfed to created room for a similar weapon with the intent of getting people to sink more money... There are a lot of really shady practices going on right now, whether they are intentional or just a lack of foresight on the part of the game designers is irrelevant, once people have invested real money you have to make incredibly careful considerations before they alter the things they have purchased or you lose consumer faith. Honesty I could go on about it but first and foremost the most important part of any PvP driven game is player population and density. Stabilize the game so that it is at least engaging enough to retain the player base it already has.
Until they bring in population control/caps then it is going to be a mess until people start to leave. It needs to be done NOW and they are just dragging their feet as long as they can on this one. Combine that with: - Very high prices make the game non-appealing to new or non-paying players. - Bad balance problems with fixes coming almost a month after. - When balance is finally addressed, they either do next to nothing (like 5% increases) or go at it with a sledgehammer and break it again. - Many unlockable upgrades and items are either totally broken and don't work or do next to nothing. - Even the most expensive unlockables don't actually look any different from anything else. - TK'ing and griefing is rampant and not punished by SOE. - No metagame/objective = boring! - Some of the worst base design in the history of gaming. - Money-grubbing practices. No transfers, no refunds, purchases are character-bound, intentional misinforming in the sub purchasing, prices in general are some of the highest in the F2P industry in regards to priceerformance. - Ties into the above point, but weapon trials last 30 minutes and cannot be re-trialed for a solid MONTH. - Bugs and glitches ahoy! Many items are rendered totally useless by bugs that have existed since the beta and have yet to be fixed. - Massive air superiority. - Game runs like a block of cement on every the most powerful of machines. Performance for many people is still atrocious. But like you said - population is the most important. I've seen continents clear out within the span of a single hour due to pop imbalance.
It would be nice if SOE had a reasonable community management team as well. I desperately hope that they have solutions already in the pipeline for this but if they do they are doing an incredibly bad job talking about. More likely though they are too busy trying to figure out which weapons to nurf so they can recreate and sell it to us. Did anyone else notice that they had said they were going to make lock on weapons require lock on and not be allowed to dumbfire.... however they didn't implement that even though it was in the patch notes and instead let those rockets dumb fire and made a NEW weapon that can lock on to both types of vehicles and isn't allowed to dumbfire. It's pretty eye opening to see that they had a clear design for how to "fix" those weapons and instead of fixing them they created a new weapon to get us to pay for the design they wanted in the first place.
